


Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind: All Down the Years

by Runeless



Series: Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind [2]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Ashen wolves baby!, Assassins, Crimson Wind, Dragons, Dragons everywhere, F/M, Found Family, Love Story, Murderer, Redemption, Revolution, Side Stories, Stealth Kills, Suicide, TW: Violence, Verdant Flower, Verdant Flower Crimson Wind, Violence, War, adopting feral nobles, also, freaks, macuil - Freeform, metodey - Freeform, oh shit, sappy romance, this one is much more action oreitned than the first, tw: suicidal ideation, tw: war
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22224103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runeless/pseuds/Runeless
Summary: Everyone is the main character in their own life's story.( How others lived, and died; the hearts of those who are not directly related to our tale, but are relevant nonetheless.)Side stories set in the Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind universe, and canon to that story.
Relationships: Miklan/Ladislava
Series: Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599715
Comments: 18
Kudos: 44





	1. The War as it Began

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome one and all!
> 
> These are side-stories set in the Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind setting. They are CANON to that story; these happened. I wanted a slightly different format for these, so I set them off in their own little fic.
> 
> Here's hoping ya'll like side characters!

**The War as it Began**

**Duke von Aegir's Paralogue:**

**Nobility Worthy of the Name**

**Adrestia resists.**

_\- Motto of the Enbarr Underground_

This is a story they tell in Adrestia.

“ Duke von Aegir, you know, he regretted it all, in the end. He took power after our blessed Emperor died, when poor Lady Edelgard was too young to take the throne, but he didn't do well with it, as we all know.”

“ Still, he was no servant of dragons; he turned against the traitor Varley, at the end. He burned all the secrets of Adrestia, having beforehand ensured his son knew them; and so it is that our Emperor, Lady Edelgard, has secret places to draw on. Our true Emperor draws on the Empire's real strength. I heard he laughed before they executed him, and spit in Varley's face.”

This is the truth of what happened to the Prime Minister.

-

Varley had something to show him, or so he'd said. Duke von Aegir rolled his eyes. Varley always _had_ thought he was more clever than he was, the overdramatic prick.

Unfortunately, it was a trip of some hours to reach Varley's estate, which sat outside Enbarr proper; it left him time to read, and to think. Varley was trying some stunt, and he needed to figure out what the political gain was.

It was a good time to make a move, von Aegir had to admit. The Storm Caller mess that was going on at Garreg Mach was throwing everything in Fodlan out of whack. Every newspaper in Fodlan was talking about the hunt for this terrorist, how they dared strike at the heart of the Church, how the Church was being defended by Lady Edelgard and her Black Eagles.

Goddess, but that was a storm of publicity he could do without. Edelgard had been a... handled problem, kept off-kilter and off-balance, and while she'd sit the throne _eventually,_ von Aegir had plans to keep her in her place. He had run Adrestia for years now, and he did not feel like relinquishing his grip. He'd spent so long pushing her into the background, making people forget about her...

But this mess had restored her to the forefront of her people's minds, and in the worst possible way. The first news most of Adrestia heard of their future Emperor was not some scandal or failure, but of heroics- the Lady Edelgard, fighting to defend the most sacred site in all of Fodlan from dragon cultists. Dragon cultists, at Garreg Mach itself! And to stand against this fount of unbelievable evil, there she was, their little future Emperor, and every story sold her and her Black Eagles as legendary heroes.

How could they not? Dragon cultists were a thing unknown, a callback to the terrible (and probably mythical, he thought) stories the Church told about the War of Seiros. They were the most classic of villains, the ur-example, the archetype that all bad guys in every story in Fodlan hailed back to in some way. Dragon cultists, who had sworn to serve the Goddess' monstrous daughter, and betrayed the Goddess and their own race to do so.

To fight them was to put oneself in the shoes of Nemesis, and given that she was supposedly his very descendant, it was easy to cast Edelgard as Nemesis come again; that the Eagles' teacher had inherited the Sword of the Creator made it worse. Edelgard, as Nemesis come again, and her Eagles as the Elites returned; that was how the people were seeing them, legendary figures in their own lives, and they were eagerly discussed by everyone from highest noble to lowest peasant. He'd even seen the Black Eagle, that random symbol of Garreg Mach's officer's school, painted on a few walls about Enbarr by the kind of young punks who drew symbols on walls.

He looked down at the paper in his hands, a paper published a week ago that had become the best selling newspaper Enbarr ahd ever seen. It was a very skilled artist's rendition of Edelgard and her Eagles at battle in the Adrestian Times, a full-page spread that had been seen by everyone in the city, and much beloved. The Eagles fought in the ruins of the village of Remire, a tragedy oft-spoken of, where the living had been turned into draconic monsters at the command of the Storm Caller, beasts made out of men.

It was an _amazing_ drawing; there was a reason it was so popular, and he was man enough to admit it. There was Edelgard at the front, her great axe Aymr held high, battling the Storm Caller personally. Behind and beside her, the Eagles held off a horde of dragon-masked warriors and mutated berserkers. He knew _exactly_ what picture this was meant to look like, the famous stained glass of Nemesis and his Elites against Seiros, an image decorating every church in Enbarr and half of those in greater Adrestia, an image repeated a million times and echoed here.

_For someone who doesn't have a public relations team, Edelgard's got me beat in that arena,_ he thought with sardonic amusement.

She really did, too. Edelgard looked... heroic, subtle touches to her features made a young female Nemesis of her, face grimly set as she hacked at the Caller's snarling wyvern, a single long cut over her left eye partially blinding her- but still she pressed on, the very definition of a warrior queen, hurt but unbowed.

To her left was the newest incarnation of the Vestras, darkness in his hands, slaying a berserker for his Emperor. His family's sinister looks were rendered softer by the artist, made him look mysterious and wise rather than simply creepy; the Prime Minister, having had far too many meetings with the man's father, just shook his head. Vestras always looked like they'd just killed someone.

Next to him was her retainer, Petra, once-princess of Brigid. The Duke rolled his eyes. It was bad enough that Edelgard had decided to rescue one of her family's killers- but if it had just been some commoner, that wouldn't have been so bad. A daughter of bakers, or something. Sure, go for it! That wouldn't have been so troublesome.

But no, the girl had to go and save the _crown fucking princess_ of Brigid. Thank the dead Goddess that Petra's own people viewed her loyalty oath to Edelgard as an unforgivable sin; exiling her spared the Duke the trouble of figuring out how to kill the girl. At the time, her sparing Petra was sold to the people as Edelgard acting out in grief, and it had lowered her support at the time, made the Insurrection easier- look at how foolish and weak she is, that she spares even her tormentors! Not the strong spine you'd hope for in a leader.

But recent events were changing that, too. Petra looked a hero here, this Fodlanese paper was drawing the foreigner from Brigid like she was some great weaponmaster, her weapon a blazing sword in her hands that sliced through bands of dragon cultists. No act could be more prototypically heroic in Adrestia; applied to a foreigner, it made the Duke feel... uneasy. Uncomfortable. There was deeper change in this picture, born entirely from that idea...

Putting it out of mind, he looked to the other side of the Emperor. To Edelgard's right, her teacher, Byleth, defended her from a spearman; she was a fellow descendant of Nemesis, or so they said, wielding in her hands the sacred Sword of the Creator, another thing of miracles that was so impossible that the Prime Minister still could not wrap his mind around it. The Crest of Flames roared around her, and the Sword was a lashing whip of bone, tearing apart all comers with its gleaming red light.

That one had even come with a backstory, was called the Ashen Demon for her fury as a mercenary captain... as if _this_ story needed more drama in it. He'd heard the Goddess had a sense of humor; he hadn't realized she was this much of a hack as a writer, though.

Behind them was Caspar, second son of Bergliez, now more famous than anyone from his house and more celebrated, too. He was swinging axes and keeping a vast crowd back even as he bled from a dozen wounds, a warrior's grin on his face. Linhardt von Hevring stood behind him, healing his wounds, and speculation abounded that they were lovers; by the Goddess' love handles, if the Duke never once read more speculation about whether they were together or not, it'd be too soon.

Something about a healer and his warrior boyfriend apparently got the rocks off for a lot of Adrestians, though, so it was a favorite subject; the Duke liked men and women both, so he could kind of get it, but the obsession was just weird.

Beside them was Raphael, their transfer student from Leceister, who was big as two men and strong as ten; he held a berserker up in his mighty hands, was hurling him bodily into a crowd of his brethren. Raphael, who he'd heard compared to the mythical tribe of Cethleann, the gentle dragons, for his size and his strength. It was odd; Leceister was famous for archers, but from the land of such precision, Edelgard had drawn a great brute. Maybe they'd kicked him out for being bad at archery.

Farther to the right was Varley's daughter, a girl he had almost hitched Ferdinand too, save that his son begged him not to once he heard of her strange habits. Between his son's distaste and his own dislike of Varley, he had decided against the match; he would not marry his son off to someone he hated. The Duke had loved his wife, and would not subject his son to a torturous marriage, no matter the gain.

Still, she did not seem so strange or objectionable in this picture; the artist drew a confident young archer, bow loosing an arrow at a mage trying to strike down Edelgard. Maybe she'd grown up. He couldn't imagine Varley's daughter not being a psychopath, but then again, Ferdinand wasn't much like him, so he had no real room to judge.

Making up the right flank was that very same son, drawn rather accurately, if he had to say so himself. He could almost hear him yelling his name, the taunting declaration that had made him wonder what horse had kicked him in the head. He wore that stupid, cocky smile on his face, the one his father had always feared, for that attitude would get him killed. Ferdinand thought himself invincible, long past the point where most young boys did; a victim of his own incredible talent, really.

The Prime Minister was not a man given to prayer, but this at least he would ask of the Goddess- protect my fool son.

At least Ferdinand could partake of Edelgard's fame; Edelgard's star had rocketed into the foremost position, but Ferdinand was being carried on that crimson wind.

In the drawing, his son was shielding the last three Eagles, moving between them and a vicious axe-wielding barbarian, which... just about fit, that was how his son was, noble and self-sacrificing and dumb as a box of rocks.

One he defended was Annette, their knightly companion, the Faerghi who wished to know magic. She was dancing out the steps to spells of wind, a gentle smile on her young face as her spells blew the enemy away. Beside her was opera singer Dorothea Arnault, who was singing lightning into the fray, looking as beautiful as she ever had on stage.

That was additional absurdity; Dorothea Arnault, the last great opera star of the Mittelfrank Company, was one of the Eagles. What were the chances? Dragon cultists at Garreg Mach, and one of the people fighting back was last year's fan-favorite pop star.

If he wasn't living through it, he'd call bullshit. The whole thing sounded like something from one of those awful Faerghi chivalric tales Ferdinand had loved so much, and never grown out of. He'd often thought of banning him from reading them, but had never gotten around to it.

( And... somewhere inside, where he did not let himself know this... it had felt like a step too far. He was not a good man, but to dictate what his own son could or could not do, to take over his life that way, to take so _much_ control from him... no, greedy and grasping that he was, that was a step too far, a step too cruel. His son was allowed to become who he would be, despite his father's grumblings and misgivings. Rather despite himself, the Prime Minister had made an acceptably average father, a test better men had taken and failed.)

The last was Flayn, the strangest and most mysterious of the Eagles, a girl rescued by Edelgard from Remire, presented in the picture as a scarred healer, wounded but keeping the others in the fray. Speculation _abounded_ about that one; he'd even heard someone claim she was one of Cethleann's manaketes, that her strange hair was a sign she was one of those legendary warriors, come to fulfill the ancient promise made to Nemesis long ago.

Church legends _did_ give manaketes that shade of sea-green hair, and it was vanishingly rare to see it, but that might be artist's interpretation as much as it was anything else. It didn't stop the fervent wondering, though.

The inside of the paper was dedicated entirely to stories about them, and given that Ferdinand rarely communicated with him, it was through that paper he'd learned some of his son's actions. He was credited with many lives in Remire, noted for his incredibly well-rounded talents, and had apparently picked up a love of heavy armor at some point.

He was also credited with coming in second in the White Heron Cup, which made his father laugh. He remembered that damn dance competition. He'd apparently lost to Prince Dimitri's retainer Dedue, who had pulled off some squat dance of Faerghus that had left the judges impressed but also wincing for the man of Duscur's knees. He'd seen men perform that dance, and gave the judges credit; you couldn't be ashamed to lose to that kind of show.

Still, the paper had caused problems. Duke von Aegir had received letters from Church officials he'd previously considered serene and sober women, asking if he intended to send his son the sacred shield of the family, an old heirloom he'd honestly forgotten about. The Duke was a practical man, at day's end, and so he never thought about the supposed gift of their ancestor. They wanted him to give it to his son so he could “truly take up his role as one of the new Elites”, and he hadn't really responded, mostly out of sheer derision. Ridiculous.

Hell, he wasn't even sure _any_ of that was real, it sounded too much like the founding myths of other nations. Brigid supposedly was carved out of the sea by the hands of giants, Duscur's legendary forebear was a Queen whose wisdom was such that she spun books out of sunlight and flowers, and Adrestia had Nemesis and his ten Elites. It wasn't hard to fathom that it was all a lie.

Same with this Dragon Cultist bullshit; just somebody hiding their real motives. A great disguise, he had to admit begrudgingly; it was so damn bizarre that it was impossible to guess who might be behind it. He almost wondered if the conspiracy theory claiming it was just the Church pulling the biggest prank in history was right.

If it was, he wished they'd done something else. His damn son was half Faerghi in his soul, obsessed with honor and justice and all kinds of other things that were, at day's end, just pretty words. He'd hoped Garreg Mach would drill those notions out of his head, but this Storm Caller mess was just the kind of thing that could reinforce all kinds of stupid ideas.

“ We're here, sir.”

His driver's words spurred von Aegir out of his thoughts. Outside his window, Varley's estate loomed large. Some buildings weren't as big as they looked; this one did. It was a big and frankly overdone kind of thing, the sort of structure you'd build if your penis was _vanishingly_ small.

Duke von Aegir, who had never felt inadequate in any respect, could not help but be both amused and irritated by the absurd show of masculinity the building represented. Every piece of it was martial; swords were crossed on all walls, banners depicting bloodshed hung from every parapet, the entire thing was designed as a particularly squat, turtle-like fortress, a great ugly fist of a building patrolled by Varley troops. He even had a moat, which was so absurd that it almost beggared belief.

It was, quite simply put, embarrassingly out of place. Enbarr was a place of pleasure mansions, fine estates, wealth and culture; Enbarr _itself_ was the fortress. It had walls and fortifications and hardpoints, your own personal home didn't need those. That was how living in a city _worked_. Soldiers loyal to the Emperor and House Vestra manned the walls, so your own troops didn't have to. Duke von Aegir's men weren't here in Enbarr, they were back home, where they were _supposed_ to be. Unless you planned a bloody revolution, you didn't have troops this close to Enbarr yourself, and Varley lacked the support for it. This was like a little dog snarling at an elephant.

Still, at least it was outside Enbarr proper, separated from the capital's outer walls by a few rough miles; von Aegir only had to see the damn thing on special occasions, like this one.

In the rough semi-circle of road and graveled earth before the drawbridge, other coaches were lined up, their occupants having arrived early. Duke von Aegir had arrived late; it was important to let Varley know that he came when he chose, not when called.

Still, he wasn't _too_ late. He wanted to see what was going on. When the coach stopped, and his servant opened the door, von Aegir stepped out. A footman approached from the drawbridge.

“ Duke von Aegir, welcome,” the man said, all smooth politeness on his mustached face. “ Please, come this way.”

He nodded, not bothering with a reply. Time to see what bullshit Varley had come up with.

-

They were gathered in a great hall that had a row of seats on one side, and what looked like a tall, covered pole dominated the other side of the room. Everyone else was already sitting down, and the Duke recognized everyone in the room; there were representatives of seven major Houses here. Not just the most major houses- he did not see Vestra or Bergliez here- but most of the major ones and some of the more prominent mediocre families.

He gave a nod to Lady Hevring, who returned it, her green hair fading to white in her old age even as her mind and eyes remained sharp; she was one of the few he genuinely respected. You did not cross Old Lady Sea with impunity.

The seat he was directed to was in the front row, as was proper, and it was even semi-comfortable. Well. Now whatever foolishness Varley had planned would be at least somewhat more bearable; the Duke could not count how many meetings in shitty chairs he'd had to endure.

Once he was seated, Varley emerged from nearby. He was all muscle, another thing von Aegir found ridiculous; he was no great warrior, he just _fancied_ himself one. Sure, he'd attended Garreg Mach, and dealt with bandits, but hell, so had von Aegir, back in the day. Being a warrior didn't mean you were _great_ at it.

Varley's battleaxe hung from his back, more theater played more for the actor's benefit than the audience's, though it did not prevent the Duke from being entertained. He headed to the long, covered pole in the center.

“ Everyone! Adrestia is about to come undone,” he said. “ And I'd love to talk about that, but let's not do that old song-and-dance where I try to convince you and then reveal my trump card. I never much liked gambling, after all; so let's put all hands on the table, _now_.”

Varley turned, as murmuring began, and gave a small bow to someone on the other end of the hall.

They stepped forward, out of the shadows, a tall, older man, with sea-green in his hair. He wore a simple shirt and pants in Alliance colors, the kind of thing you saw on every Alliance citizen in every town in Leceister. He didn't seem to be special or interesting at all, save... save for his eyes, there was a cold fury and a _contempt_ there that had weight, some animal instinct in the back of his mind screamed that he was a rabbit and here, here came a hawk.

He had a stone, on his necklace, a shining green emerald that drew the eye, but it was hard to see past the dismissal in his eyes.

“ Honored guest,” Varley said to him.

“ Future Emperor,” the man replied, and eyes snapped to Varley, as gasps echoed in the room. The strange “ I am ready.”

“ Good,” Varley said, then turned to the nobles with a bright smile. “ I apologize for the brusqueness, but it was either this or sit through an hour of arguments I didn't need to. You'll understand the need for speed, I'm sure.”

He whipped the cover from the thing in the center. Gasps and exclamations echoed about the room; even von Aegir, used to schooling himself, was surprised, sucked in his breath.

It was the head of the Bergliez family, strapped to a post, mouth gagged. What...?

“ Do it,” Varley said to his strange attendant as he stepped back, and the man with sea-green hair put his hand to the stone on his neck.

The Duke heard someone say, quietly, “ That's not possible.”

The man was not there anymore. There was- von Aegir's mind shattered- dragon, dragon, _dragon_ , it stood tall as a mountain, it filled the room, face an eagle and a reptile all at once, wings spread wide as the horizon. He heard Bergliez screaming in terror through his gag and there were screams, screams, from all around him, he could not scream but simply stared, dumbfounded, as tears of fear ran down his cheeks.

The dragon opened its raptor's mouth, the beak a terrible and snapping thing, and from that hideous jaw they heard a rumbling sound.

The rmble grew, and then, with all the fury of a sandstorm, Bergliez was stripped of his skin by the terrible wind that roared from the beast's throat.

The dragon's breath consumed him. A single horrid blast, and there was no more Bergliez, just the stripped bones and tattered rags of flesh that had once been a person with thoughts and dreams. Varley laughed, and all hell laughed with him.

A few moments later, something of sanity returned to the Duke, the hammer blow of a dragon something his mind suffered from but could deal with. Even as he slumped in his once-comfortable chair, as his mind tried to figure out just _what_ was going on, he felt something curling in his guts, something that grew stronger when he looked at Varley, or the Goddess-damned dragon whose ugly, burning eyes gazed arrogantly at the crowd, eyes that were the color of the desert sun that did not give life but took it.

That curling something was a feeling he could not identify. He was afraid, obviously... but that emotion wasn't alone. There was something... else, too. Something he almost _remembered_ , from... from years before. A feeling he'd had when his son had called him out on some moral or ethical argument, years ago, before Ferdinand had simply given up on him at all.

He watched his fellow Adrestian's corpse hang there, smelled his flesh cooking from sheer friction, looked at Varley laughing and the dragon's wicked grin, and the emotion that he could not name twisted in his guts.

“ This is their power,” Varley intoned. “ We cannot stand against this, gentlemen; but fortunately, we don't need to. We can _work_ with them, and take what is ours!”

-

It would be hard to say what else happened at Varley's that night. Words, promises, threats, a million things. They ran like sand through von Aegir's fingers; he couldn't focus on it. He knew the vague outline of things. Varley wished to be an Emperor. The attack would come tomorrow, dragons would assault and they would open the gates to them. Varley already had men in place to do it; he asked of them not even really aid for his scheme, but acquiescence. He remembered their faces as the gathered families sold themselves to the devil, he remembered Lady Hevring crying as she capitulated, the old and invincible warrior undone by the sight of dragons. He vaguely recalled nodding his head numbly at Varley, who said he'd be at von Aegir's house later with a special request.

But most of all, he remembered Bergliez, flesh ripped off, and the sight of that terrible dragon.

He was back home before he knew it, somehow in his horror he had stumbled into his coach and... and when did he get here? He was sitting at his desk in his private office when he came to, when time made sense again, when things had mass and gravity and it was all normal and had no dragons in it.

...What was he going to do? He took out the hidden whiskey in his desk, but when he tried to fill his glass his shaking hands spilled it everywhere, and finally he simply sipped from the bottle directly. His shivering knocked the glass against his teeth but he did not care, _could_ not care, he felt...

He felt many things.

He... he was scared, yes, but more than that, underneath it, something so strong and so strange, he has never felt this way before, he was... infuriated. _Enraged._

This was wrong.

Such a simple argument. Three words. He'd made fun of his son for making it, he'd always made fun of his son for making it; but now, now he found he was as helpless as his boy had been to articulate more than that. Not because he lacked the words, but because it should have been _obvious_ to anyone listening.

No one deserved to die like that, no one deserved to die such a terrible death, all just so Varley could... could be _dramatic_. It wasn't necessary, having a dragon at all was so overwhelming that he could have overawed them with just that.

There was no _reason_ for this!

Duke von Aegir, to his surprise, had found a line in him, that there was, impossibly, a limit to his desires. There was a line in him, and... now he was deciding if he was going to cross it... or not.

He could swallow his pride and go with Varley, cross that line- and once you cross a line, it wasn't a line anymore, it was just a drawing in the dirt.

But... if he did not... if he held the line, and did not cross it, then he could...

Could what? Die? He could not fight a dragon.

“ Sir, you have a visitor at the door,” said a servant. He hadn't even noticed the woman come in, nor had he heard her knocks.

“ Let them in,” he said, knowing who it would be. He was right, of course; into his private office walked the great muscular bulk of Varley, and it seemed less silly now and more horrifying. Playing at warrior, maybe... but he was not playing at being dangerous. No, at that he had proven quite capable.

Duke von Aegir did not have to fake sweating in Varley's presence; knowing what he did now about what the man was capable of, he felt fear was an appropriate response.

“ Duke von Aegir! Good to see you,” the man said, smiling. “ I'm sure you're eager to hear my request.”

His thoughts continued as some part of him tried, sluggishly, to respond, to this terrifying monster in a human-shaped suit. Duke von Aegir couldn't fight a dragon by himself. But an army could. And he... he could... he had the funds. He might be able to figure out a resistance of some kind... he might be able to... to do what? He had no idea what he would be able to do, even if he _were_ to choose to resist. What plan or scheme could he figure out that would do any harm to _dragons_? He could still wait it out... be safe...

“ What would you ask of me?” he said, and he was not sure if he was lying or merely requesting orders. His guts were churning. This wasn't how it was supposed to go, not how the tales his son had read and that he'd perused- if only to see where Ferdinand had gotten his stupid ideas from- had said it would go. He felt no steel in his spine. He was just sick, and scared, and... and _angry_.

_Angry._

“ Good!” Varley said with a booming laugh. “ Excellent! You'll be a fine servant of the Alliance. I need you to get me the records for the secret funds- the ones they've hidden, that aren't on any books anywhere. As royal treasurer, you're the only one who knows how to open those locks. So get those for me, won't you? The invasion starts tomorrow, so you need to hurry it up. I'd have given you more time, but let's be honest, we're all schemers here; if you had more time, you'd find some way to abuse it, so work with what I've given you. Do hurry; this will go so much smoother if we have something more to offer our new benefactors.”

The funds, the archives... an idea clicked into place. That... that was something he can do. He could keep Varley and his draconic overlords from getting their hands on the secret funds of Adrestia, and make accessing even the open resources of the nation harder.

It almost felt like it would be... right, even as he knew, down in his bones that he would die doing it. He was no quick thief or brilliant spy. He would not escape his great act.

But it would be... good. The moral choice, the thing a man should do, in the face of something that was... wrong.

Right, good, moral... his son's words. He could hear them in his son's voice, even now. He had never put much stock in his son's faith before, not the Goddess he spoke of but his _real_ faith, his belief in nobility and greatness and glory. His son's great... ideals, he supposed. He had mocked him, been cruel to his son, though he had never been a Varley; no, even he at his worst had more morals and rules than something like Varley, though that was not as comforting as it used to be. Not now, not with this terrible choice before him.

Maybe it took more.

He could do as Varley asked. He could turn the records in, he could do it right _now_. He had made a copy himself, after all, the most hidden records in all of Adrestia were secretly doubled by him. He was no fool, had not trusted the others and definitely not Edelgard's father. Every secret of Adrestia was located in this very home, nay, they were located right here, in his bottom right drawer beneath a false bottom. He could lean down and give them to him and assure himself a peaceful reign in Enbarr, servant of inhuman beasts.

He could... and he wanted to do it, that's the worst part, even remembering the way Bergliez had _burned_. His son would _never_ have considered handing the records over, but he was made of weaker stuff than his son.

_My son is a better man than I_ , he thought, with despair... but he did not move to turn the records over immediately. There was still that anger, that thing he did not know the name of, this sense that this must be _opposed_. The active sense of good, that sees evil, that demands that recompense be made and sins punished, that visited judgment on the wicked.

The coin of choice flipped inside his skull. Once. Twice. Three and four times, for he was caught, trapped between his fear and this new thing, this righteous fury... whose name he finally realizes, belatedly, he realizes it is his sense of... _justice_ , after all these years. Justice. He knows that what he saw was unjust, and he seeks to fight it.

Goddess, when had he unpacked all these childish toys? Justice and honor and righteousness. All these things of his son.

If he _doesn't_ do what Varley says, he will die. But if he does... Ferdinand will die. Ferdinand, whose face is well known as enemy of the dragons. Ferdinand, his son. They'll never let him live, he's too famous as the enemy of the dragon masks, who he now belatedly realizes were not wearing disguises at all.

Maybe it doesn't matter. He's young yet. If he takes Varley up on his offer, he can have more sons, his position will be high in the puppet government and there will be no shortage of nubile young women seeking his bed. He could have other sons.

...But none of them would be Ferdinand.

He...

He cannot trust his own instincts here, he is in the face of evil and he cannot trust himself.

So he will not trust his own beliefs... he will trust the words of his son, the child must teach the parent.

...He must be the man his son would have had him be.

_My son is a better man than I_ , he thought again, not in despair but with rising and furious conviction. _I have to help him_.

“ I'll do it,” his lips lied to the man before him. Goddess bless his long history of lies, even as the man he has just this second decided to be, that skill carried him through. “ The hidden funds of Adrestia will be in your hands by tomorrow afternoon.”

“ Most excellent!” Varley roared with laughter. The man who hoped to be worthy of his son faked a sadistic smirk back, even as his heart recoiled. He had wanted to marry his son off to this man's family? Goddess, what must his daughter be like, to be raised by such a man? “ When I lead Enbarr, when I am Emperor, I'll put you in a high position. I believe in rewarding useful servants.”

_She'd be a saint or a beast, no inbetweens._

“ You'll be better than that foolhardy girl Edelgard,” Aegir lies again, adding a snort of contempt to his words. How easy all this was, Goddess above, he was _so close_ to being this man in truth that the lie rankles, just a little bit. “ Shame she didn't die with the rest of them. Come, let's toast to our success!”

He and Varely drank, and they both toasted success, but they did not toast the same success.

The purple-haired man left, to make plans to destroy the nation... and left behind in his home, von Aegir made plans to save it.

He has only just now decided to be a good man, he will be a good man only one day in all his life... but a person can change in an instant.

And Goddess, Goddess, if any instant demanded change it was the instant in which he saw a dragon. Dragons were real. That meant... that meant so much, it changed _everything_ , he does not live in the world he thought he did. Things were different than he had assumed.

He must accept it all. Brigid had been built by giants. A Queen in Duscur had once written a book of sunlight and the pen was the moon. Nemesis had fought Seiros at the beginning of time with Saint Cethleann at his side and the alliance of human and dragon blood had proven triumphant over the apex predators of the world.

And, smallest and biggest of all, his son's ideals were real and right, and he had to live up to them.

Thus it was that, for the first time, a good man sat in that chair, and tried to figure out what the hell to do.

He cannot trust his own instincts; his instincts would have led him to work with Varley. He must trust that his son was right; he must adopt wholesale his son's way of life, he must see through a better man's eyes than his own, to find the path ahead.

What would be best to do? He had a copy of the secret records here in his house, and then there was the official copy hidden in the Treasury- hidden in multiple scrolls and multiple books. Both had to be removed from play. Let not Varley nor the Alliance find them, to give to dragons.

The question, of course, that echoed- where did they find dragons? Had there always been dragons in the Alliance, were the whispered words of Seiros' loyal followers the reason that area had rebelled so often? Was this new? Were they locals, or foreign invaders?

He'd heard rumors of dragons in Almyra but dear Goddess, people believed anything about Almyra, especially after the country had withdrawn into itself over the last hundred years. Who knew?

It didn't matter. He had the task ahead.

The official records were the simplest. He'd have to burn the official records. He wouldn't even need to take in anything to do it with, he had fire magic... well, he _used_ to. Goddess. Fire magic. He hadn't used combat magic in... decades, not since Garreg Mach.

He had been to Garreg Mach once, long ago, but his tenure there was less fraught than his son's. Lessons there he had barely paid attention to, too busy getting in his time with nameless girls of common descent he had used and abused and thrown away, or getting drunk with the band of bastards that, years later, he had helped become “regent” over the land after Edelgard's entire family died in screaming pain at the hands of foreign devils.

Foreign devils... or foreign _dragons_? Perhaps... this all seemed so... planned. So lucky, that they should invade Adrestia when the war with Brigid had devastated both nations. Brigid was an awful convenient Tragedy for Adrestia to have, wasn't it? Weakening one nation and destroying another, rendering each vulnerable...

...He had signed those orders. The Tragedy was, in part, his fault. He had not swung the axe like Bergliez had, but... it had been his hand that signed the paper. It was the thing Ferdinand had, finally, been done with him for, when he learned the true scope of the Tragedy, of how Adrestia had hollowed Brigid out and left the husk standing as a gravestone.

...He must make whatever penance he can. He cannot bring back the dead, but... but he might be able to help the living.

An idea has him, instead of the other way around, and he searches for paper and ink.

That night, he wrote three letters. It took him hours, sleepless save for those seconds when his head grew so heavy that it lolled on his neck and he passed out for the seconds between the fall and catching himself... but he managed it. He sealed the three large packages carefully, in paper blessed by magic against time's ravages, a spell so old Adrestia knew it in the time of Nemesis.

Some of the only magic he still regularly practiced... some fine son of Adrestia he was. In this land of magic, he knew so little... but what he had was enough.

He prayed, in that moment. He had taken up all the other things of his son, why not this? _Goddess, watch over me, let me be enough for this last task._

Three letters. One is to his son, who has already surpassed him, who he hoped would grow higher still. His letter had words of reconciliation in it, and he hoped his son would find it in his noble heart to forgive his foolish father.

One to Edelgard, his Emperor, at last and at the last. It had his words of fealty to her, it begged her forgiveness for his mishandling of her, and it listed the names of every traitor he knows of- and not just those who swore to join Varley. Those who had been traitors for years, in big ways and small. Every secret thing he had learned in all his years of governance, which she would need to rule from Enbarr's throne, all of it, a report and a confessional both. Who was fucking who, who was in love, who was in hate, who was secretly a monster, who was secretly a saint.

Things he had done in the dark, and what he knew of the shadows of other nobles, all offered up to her hands, so that when she came into the full of her power, she would have blackmail and wisdom no Emperor had possessed since the time of Nemesis. If she is Nemesis come again, if her and the Eagles are the new Elites of this Second War of Dragons- and how can they not be? These teenagers, who have fought this war since it began, when their elders knew nothing of the threat- how can they be anything _but_ heroes?- then he will make sure she has a chance to do what Nemesis did, and build a better future for everyone out of the ruins of old Adrestia. To Edelgard's hands he commended the secret resources of the nation, in a book thick as a door and heavy with the weight of secret things.

The third was to Petra, Queen of Brigid, to whom debts must be paid; and in the name of that debt, in the name of every person he murdered in the Tragedy with a stroke of his pen, he included in his letter to Petra his signed, stamped authorization for her to use whatever resources of his House she needed to rebuild Brigid.

His son would approve, he knew. It was the kind of grand gesture he'd always liked, and he knew his son well; he knew he would not care about the loss of his inheritance. Ferdinand was better than that. Better enough that he would rebuild the von Aegir fortune, wash the name clean, let the blood money of his father go to restore Brigid and fill the coffers with clean coin.

And, lastly, the shield, his son's shield, that he should wield in defense of Adrestia. There is a woman- a bodyguard of Edelgard's, who was frustrated at having to stay here during her time at Garreg Mach- he shall give it to her.

Lauris... no, Ladislava, that is her name. The shield, and the letters, he shall give to her.

She will be the first person he visited in what was left of the night. The second would be Randolph, who needed to know of his father's death... who would be asked to die, too. Duke von Aegir will need time, to do his great work. He will need- he will need time.

Ladislava was easy to find, still at the guard barracks he had passed a million times in the capital and, until tonight, never went inside. He woke her, and she was enraged to see him, save that... she saw _something_ in him that ceased her grumbling, made her pay attention. He did not tell her the truth, told her only what she would believe, that the enemy was coming and could not be stopped... and that Lady Edelgard would need her, and the things he asked her to carry.

When he held out his precious gifts, she accepted them.

She accepted them, and she _ran_ , she woke all her soldiers up and they set out on their wyverns, fleeing into the deep darkness that came when midnight was over but the sun had not yet dreamed of morning. He blessed that infinite night; it meant there was a chance she and hers could escape. A few Adrestians would live because of his actions, and it would have to be enough.

Randolph next, to learn that Bergliez had disappeared two days before. Randolph, to learn that his father had died, to be told the whole truth, and to see in von Aegir's terrified and tormented eyes that they were no lie. Randolph, who woke his house and sent them into hiding, hugging his little sister one last time. She tried to stay, but he told her no, and did not lie when she asked if he would join them, instead pressing twin knives into her hands and begging her to stay alive for his sake.

Then his retainers dragged the screaming girl off, to hide in the sewers and try to escape the city. He had debated bringing more men with him, but while von Aegir would need time, he wouldn't need _that_ much, and Randolph could not stomach ordering his troops on a suicide mission when he alone might suffice.

Randolph made his weapons ready, and so the two of them set off, the strangest of all duos, united at the end, silent on their long walk to their deaths.

The Prime Minister considered that, as he walked. Considered that the end came for all men, and why had he wasted his life on gold? It did not come with you. If afterlife existed- and for humans, they were pretty sure it didn't- then you could not buy your way through it with gold. And when a man was dying, as all men died... what did he have to comfort himself with, if all he had was gold? It was no comfort to die knowing one's bank account was full, it did one no good.

No wonder his son had been so obsessed with honor and nobility and all things the wise called good; it was the only thing that lasted, the one comfort that a man could carry with him all the way to the reaper. Here at the end, the Duke has no great deeds to comfort himself with, he will slip into the dark bemoaning lost chances instead of celebrating his glories. He had no little kindnesses that he can draw strength from, no proof that his life was worth more than its direct benefit to him. He was dishonorable, and death held no mercies for him.

But... he did have a little time. Perhaps he could yet make something of himself, something the reaper cannot take away from him.

Sleepless, fueled and powered by that great, grasping will that had driven him to own all Adrestia, that he now bent to more noble ends, Duke von Aegir, with Randolph at his side, entered the Imperial castle.

...It had already been taken.

Dear Goddess, there were soldiers everywhere, all wearing the colors of House Vestra, and every one of them are Alliance troops. The disguises were good, they stood where they should and acted with the correct formality, they guarded the correct rooms... but they could not fool the Duke. He had been in this building every day for the last decade, he... he _knew_ the Vestra troops, knew the vague distaste they all had for him, whom they regarded as usurper.

Irony of ironies, the Alliance troops were _too_ nice, their salutes too crisp and too eager. A small detail... but an important one. Randolph noticed, and his eyes grew wide as he pondered the same thing von Aegir did-

How had they done it?They took the most heavily fortified location in Adrestia without the city even turning over in its sleep. How did they do this?

(Betrayal and poison, as they will never know. Varley's betrayal, and Claude's poisons, things slipping into the guards food that did not take affect for hours, and troops brought in under the guise of Varley's vanguard. Ignatz's plan, the first of many that will prove him the greatest of the Deer strategists, saving perhaps Claude himself.)

They need to... they need to get to the treasury. They were not unusual guests here, and it was clear that none of the troops here intended to stop them... at least, not yet.

The attack wasn't coming until dawn, after all, but that was little comfort- the edge of dawn was approaching. Echoing an Edelgard from another world, von Aegir cursed the edge of dawn, and wished he could run without drawing more attention. He hadn't realized how damn big the castle was until he needed to go through it swiftly, and couldn't.

Minutes passed, tense and horrible, sweat on both their brows as they walked through dozens and dozens of enemy soldiers. Randolph's hands tightened on his weapon, the Duke's clutched empty air and wished for a sword he had not worn in decades.

But, unbelievably, they reached the door. It was enormous, as was the treasury behind it, an ancient and vast library of all the documents of Adrestia. Every deed, every land contract, every tax record, all filed neatly and swiftly. It was no vault of gold, as most commoners thought, but the paper inside was much more precious; it was a record of who owned what and where, it listed the natural resources Adrestia was using and the ones it had yet to exploit. Here was the true wealth of a nation and its people.

If the Alliance got its hands on it...

If. The most powerful word in the world.

There was only a single guard in front of that huge edifice, which was... odd. He wore Vestra livery, but the blonde-haired, bespectacled kid in front of him was _obviously_ too young for such a prestigious position- as well as the fact that protocol demanded a squad of five guards here at all times, including at least one mage. He'd written that law himself.

“ We're entering,” he said instead, without preamble. If the Vestra guards did not know he was generally despised amongst the guards, they might also assume he was the arrogant kind of noble who didn't notice mistakes like they'd just made. “ You are dismissed.”

“ Of course, sir,” the guard said, though the eyes- something smart there, terribly smart. The guard moved aside, and Randolph paused where he was, guarding von Aegir's back as he approached the vast bulk of the door, made of thick planks of good Adrestian Gray Oak and bounded with the finest in Enbarr steel. There were armies that lacked the means to knock a door like this down. The keys in his hands are so small, and rattled as he put the first one into the lock; his hands are shaking. It is not an easy thing, for someone like him to decide to die...

But he turned the key anyway, and went through the five step sequence that opened all the locks, even with his shaking hands. _Not easy_ was a far cry from _impossible._

He pushed the door open with effort. Another mistake; the guard, who had not left despite being dismissed, should have been helping him. The door's hinges were very well-made, but the door was still heavy as lead, and he was a chubby man unused to physical exertion.

Still, he was enough. The door opened to the quiet, dark treasury, that vast room, split into two floors, row after row of books and filing cabinets and desks and papers. His workspace. His tomb.

“ Randolph,” he said, not looking back.

“ Yeah?” the Bergliez warrior responded.

“ Buy me time,” he said, and then Randolph was swinging his axe at the Alliance soldier.

The scuffle he heard behind him was not spared a second glance. He had to do this work, now.

( He did not see Ignatz dodging, waiting to see what he would do. The Deer couldn't afford to have the Alliance steal Adrestia's gold, it would make them too strong, and Ignatz had some arrows designed to burn he could use to do the job... but there was something happening here, and while he dodged Randolph's axe swings, he watched.)

He worked his hands through old patterns, his lips whispering old words, the cadences and rhythms that woke up the magic in a human soul. His mind, meanwhile, came to a single, almost funny thought: he had lived all his life to gather gold in his unworthy hands.

Now he would die to scatter it, to put it into the hands of others.

Perhaps the thought was the match he needed, or by dumb luck he has the thought just as his words were said right and he made the hand gestures just so; but regardless, on the wings of that revelation, and the peace it brought him, a thin trail of fire sparked to life in his hands.

He smiled at it, and stepped into the room. He stretched his hand forth... and he began to burn it all.

Fire, beautiful fire, cleansing fire, if dragonfire was to damn Adrestia than human fire would save it. The endless paper of the Imperial Treasury leapt to obey his command as it always did, he always was skilled at making paper dance. Now it did so in bursts of ashes and cinders, becoming momentary firebirds as the heat of the rapidly building fire lifted individual pieces of paper up to dance in hot air currents before succumbing to blazing, glorious ends. He was the dragon now, for where he pinted, fire leapt, and secrets are rendered safe by destroying them utterly. He has turned his shaking hands to the right choice, his trembling hands have done the right thing, and his son's voice in his head is warm and approving.

_You're doing the right thing, Father. This is the good thing to do. Thank you._

The room caught so quickly it almost surprised him, but then again, the whole thing was old varnished wood and paper; there was a reason he'd banned smoking in the room, and not just because he disliked the smell. The fire ran its greedy self over all the old books and the paper of the room, making merry trails of blazing fire, and he had time to think on that- it was greedy, greedy as he was. Didn't he hear someone once say that your magic reflected you?

Made sense. Something he made would have to be like him, a little bit- except Ferdinand, but a person made their own choices, so perhaps the metaphor fell apart when it came to people

After all, far from being like the Duke, the son had been a role model for the father.

( And behind him, Ignatz quit playing with Randolph, and disappeared, to hide the bodies of the original Alliance guards who were supposed to be on duty, whom he had killed with quick and deadly arrows. The treasury was destroyed. Now to make an alibi for where he'd been.)

As the Duke bathed the corners of the room in orange-red tongues of fire, the roaring fire began to sound like a song, the crackle of blazing wood a drumbeat backing up a roar that sounded a little like the rumble of a choir going full-tilt. He wondered if Ferdinand still loved to sing; he had not known his son in so long now, had not been _worthy_ to know his son.

It is a shame he will not meet him again. He hoped Ferdinand knew he loved him. He hoped that Ferdinand might approve of the man he was trying to become.

He didn't know it, but the rebels that will arise in Enbarr will speak of this moment with relish, this will be the legend that will last; Duke von Aegir, in his first and last act as a good man, blazing with fire as he turned all Adrestia's secrets to ash, so that the Alliance might not have them.

A painting will be made of him that will endure the centuries, though few will ever know that Ingatz was the one that drew it, his way of preserving the man's memory; a picture of a man surrounded by burning paper, arms lifted high as he preserved Adrestia's secrets by destroying them, and the shape of his shadow on the wall behind him will form a great black eagle, wings outspread.

Randolph fell, eventually, as Alliance troops prove too much. He was brought down wounded but alive, and when Duke von Aegir turned from his completed work, they were upon him.

It did not matter. He had done it.

That knowledge was terribly sweet, and went with him into the dark, as angry hands clubbed him.

-

When he awoke, he was in a jail cell. Randolph was in the one across from him.

Enbarr's dungeon. Huh. He never expected to see this side of it. The cell was clean, but no water or food was provided, and his wounds had not been treated

“ Did you do it?” Randolph asked, voice slurred from his broken jaw. Randolph von Bergliez had dragged down ten Alliance soldiers into death, and acquitted himself well.

“ Everything burned,” he confirmed, and the two shared the smile of a task well done.

Three days later- three days in which water and bread are brought by the blonde-haired, bespectacled guard- the guards come for them.

-

They are dragged before the steps of Enbarr by the guards, outside the palace's front gates. Conversational snatches caught on their long walk revealed that the city fell in the first hours of the attack. Varley's treachery worked. Leceister, newest of Fodlan's nations, now owned its oldest city.

The traitor himself was present, sitting atop a throne carried by servants at the top of the tall steps, and the makeshift Emperor looked like a funhouse mirror version of the woman who should have sat there. His armor was a grotesque thing, a huge and imposing beast of a suit painted in his own House colors, not the proper reds and blacks of the Imperial throne at all. It clashed badly with his stolen crown of red and black.

At his right side stood the blonde kid, who apparently was kind of important to the Alliance, wearing their gold and brown. To Varley's left stood the terrible dragon, not human, lounging atop the stairs like a cat as it watched them with bemusement in its cold and cruel eyes.

Gathered around the steps were the citizens of Adrestia, forced to watch by the Alliance guards and the multitude of dragons they brought with them.

Duke von Aegir rose his head up high. If this was his last hour... well, he had something to take before the reaper, at least.

“ Let's die well,” Randolph said next to him, and he made sounds of assent, even as the Alliance guards shoved them down at the bottom of the steps, on their knees before their new master.

Varley looked down from his throne.

“ You,” he growled. “ You are guilty of crimes against the Leceister Alliance. You have stolen from them irretrievably precious documents, conspired to commit treason and sedition, destroyed property and murdered citizens of the Alliance. How do you plead?”

Hmm. Words. Randolph struggles, he's not great with words... but the Prime Minister is. He is _very_ good.

“ **Adrestia resists!** ” he yelled at the top of his lungs, as he rose to his feet, lunging forward unsteadily. “ **Adrestia resists! Long live Lady Edelgard, the true Emperor!** ”

“ Silence him!” Varley yelled, but the damage was done, even as the guards grabbed him and shoved him down, as their fists beat into the back of his skull, he heard murmurings in the crowd. Adrestia resists, and the Lady Edelgard, the words on every tongue, the people knowing who their own papers had confirmed as a legendary figure just this week.

_Never underestimate the power of a good slogan,_ he thought to himself... before another thought hit him.

But he'd need Varley to get closer to him...

“ **You don't have the guts to kill me yourself, Varley, you cowardly fuck!** ” he shouted as the guards hauled him back to his knees, knowing that accusations of cowardice were the man's one weakness.

He didn't see Varley's snarl, but he heard the gasp as the false Emperor got up, and came down the steps.

“ Oh, I'll kill you myself,” Varley said, and pulled his great axe off his back. “ Yes, yes I will. Stand aside. He dies _slowly_.”

Duke von Aegir rose to his feet as the guards stepped back, caught a glimpse of something on the blonde man's face- regret? Respect?- before the stony mask of indifference slammed down, and he watched Varley approach, as he worked his mouth and tried to get a good wad of spit in his mouth.

“ I'd ask for last words, but I think you used them up,” Varley said, rearing back to swing his axe- but whatever was to come next did not, because Duke von Aegir spat on his face.

The world stopped dead. Varley was so angry it literally shut him down, his face stalled like he was frozen midstep. It was silent in that square, none daring to breathe or laugh- save the Duke himself, who on seeing Varley's face, did the only thing he could.

He laughed.

It was a good laugh, it was the best laugh he had ever laughed, and Randolph joined him; their last laugh, these two men, who together were the first rebels in all Adrestia. They bellowed, they _howled_ , they laughed so loud that, for just a single second, they are triumphant over all their enemies, and their joint laughter is the only lord and master in all Adrestia.

As they quiet down, as Varley trembled and his mind restarted, the Duke looked upwards, towards the noonday sun, and prayed with all his heart.

“ Goddess, save my son and the Black Eagles, so that they might someday return and save us all from the hands of traitors.”

( Somewhere under Garreg Mach, in the rubble, a body twitches. Black Eagles... they _know_ that name...)

Varley's scream of rage was the only warning the Duke had before the axe buried itself into his skull, and killed him.

( His last thought, before there is nothing but the dark, is of his son.)

-

Here is a story they tell of the Black Eagles.

“ Ferdinand von Aegir. Tragic man, you know. His father died in Enbarr, died spitting on that bastard Varley. His buddy didn't do so well, that fucking wind dragon tortured him for a long while. Heard his sister watched from the crowd, heard it cracked her mind like a hammer to a windowpane.”

“ But Ferdinand, his dad, him and Randolph burned Adrestian secrets, all kinds of things that Ferdinand knows, but the Alliance doesn't. He's the one that's been keeping them going, finding all the things his father had hidden over the years, just in case.”

“ Course, Ferdinand's kind of a mess; sorrow hurts him, he misses his father and his family. He's like our dear Emperor in that way, he's lost his family, too, but the wound's fresher; it hurts him more. They say his hair grows long in mourning, and that he will not cut it until he stands in Enbarr, his father avenged.”

**Ladislava and Miklan's Paralogue:**

**The First Dragonslayers**

**Stronger than death!**

_\- Battlecry of the Forgotten, a Faerghi knightly order, formerly a mercenary company_

Ladislava fled, and the dragon pursued.

She wasn't sure how long this had been going on. They had been traveling north, following the Duke's instructions- not that she obeyed _him_ , she was loyal to Lady Edelgard and the throne, but... something in his eyes. Something in his _voice_ , that had changed since the last time they had met. The richest man in Adrestia had stood before her in that moment without a drop of the arrogance he had displayed in their prior meetings, with a horror and a resolve in his spine she recognized from soldiers pushed too far.

Something that had propelled her, against all odds, to _believe_ him, and to take her troops away.

Thank the Goddess she had. He'd been right. They had fled as all hell broke loose, as Enbarr fell, as... as all _this_ had happened. They had flown over towns under attack, golden armies overrunning the black and red, cities ruined by siege, had hidden from dragons flying free in the air, all so that could finally get to Garreg Mach and their Emperor... only to find that their journey had been entirely pointless.

Lady Edelgard. She had to be dead. There was no one there, the holiest place in Fodlan was a murdered ruin, and she could find nothing there, not even a ghost. Just... emptiness.

She... she hadn't taken it well. The things the Duke had given her could not be delivered now, surely her Lady was dead. She had failed her Emperor... she would not even be able to repay the Duke, who had saved her and her riders, who were alive now only because he had warned them.

But this... this was... madness. They had continued fleeing north, all Adrestia was collapsing, and what few things they heard in their short trips into what few villages remained standing said that the only safety lay with Faerghus. She had her soldiers to worry about, so that was where she decided to go. Adrestia was dead with Edelgard; all she could do now was save her soldiers.

So they fled north, dodging Allied patrols and... and _dragons_ , Goddess, Goddess in her coffin, what was _happening?_

Yesterday, they had picked up a tail. A great beast with a beak, she had seen some young woman transform herself as they passed over, turn herself into this thing that rode the winds faster than the wyverns did, though she seemed less maneuverable. She was following them, getting closer, closer... but when they turned to fight, she'd disappeared, flew away.

This morning, after a long and sleepless night waiting for attack, she was back.

She was content to follow, just... following, it was driving Ladislava _mad_ , this sheer _terror_ she felt, every time she looked behind her, and saw that great raptorian dragon just... following. Her hatchets sat heavy on her saddle, as did her warhammer, and... and against a dragon, would any of it even work? How did you fight a legend?

She surveyed the land, hoping against hope for something to change the situation. The area they were in now was in the eastern parts of Faerghus, heavy and mountainous, and as they flew, they passed multitudes of golden soldiers, usually locked in battle with Faerghus knights.

Goddess, the war was so overwhelming, had the Alliance just been _waiting_? Troops flooded the continent. Everywhere, all at once, the kind of attack that took decades to plan. Everywhere, all at once, they were attacking everyone with _everything_ , without relent. The gold had swarmed the red and black, and now the blue and silver-white was dying beneath them...

She looked back. It was closer. Just a little. Closer than it had been an hour ago. It could catch up at any time but right now it was still just... waiting.

Goddess, what could possess anyone to be so _cruel_? Attack them or do not, but do not drag it out like this, a sadist toying with helpless prey...

Dragons, dragons were after them, and still they flew, Ladislava looking forward, hoping to see... anything. Something that might look like rescue or respite.

In two hours time, when the wyverns were beginning to grow weary, as the dragon grew ever closer, she spotted it.

Faerghus was a mass of mountains in this area, and they flew over a small horde of soldiers who gleamed gold and brown in the dim sunlight, burning down a small village. Alliance troops, but apparently the dead Goddess didn't want to piss in Ladislava's eyes anymore today- there were no fliers among them. The only thing chasing her and her troops was the fucking dragon.

_Only a dragon_ , her brain thought hysterically. _Only a dragon._

What world had she woken up in, that this was real? No wonder the Duke had not told her the truth of what was to come. She wouldn't have believed him. Dragons... dragons were children's stories, dragons... dragons weren't _real_...

She knew of them, of course, Church tales and stories, but... Goddess, _Goddess_ , they were _real_ and the stories didn't describe what it was like, to be _hunted_ , to have after you something that regarded you the way a cat might regard a particularly small mouse. Children feared being eaten by monsters and Ladislava found, in that moment, that her child self had been wise to fear it, as she risked a glance back and saw the curve of a _smile_ on the beak of the beast following her.

_Breathe,_ she commanded herself, as her wyvern labored, and the beast followed her. _Breathe._

Focus. Focus on this, first.

Past the dead town were the civilians, and the outriders of the Alliance forces, running them down. Civilians were fleeing the devastated town below, running fast as feet or, for the lucky, hooves could carry them, the usual horrible ragamuffin nightmare of refugees- old men carried by their daughters, men with babies in their arms, families losing one or more members even as they ran, not realizing that a brother, sister, father or mother had fallen behind them, dead with an arrow in their back.

Ladislava's heart went out to them; Faerghi or not, they were people, and her own desperate flight connected her to them, the empathy of escapees.

The civilians had a goal, though. They were heading towards the safety represented by a heavy line of black-armored troops, set up on a taller hill. They were much smaller than the Allied warband, but their lines were crisp and clean- disciplined.

A strange flag flew over them, however. It was a morbid thing, a black rag fluttering in the breeze, bone-white crossed spears underneath a grinning skull.

Yet, despite the grimness of their banner, the civilians fled to it with all speed, and Ladislava saw that the sable-clad soldiers were doing their best to make sure that those civilians made it. Arrows and magic flew over the heads of the innocent, to pierce and burst in the midst of their pursuers, and only the Goddess knew how many people were going to live because, at the last moment, some weapon struck true. The line would open to let them pass, shields raised behind them to catch return fire, spears at the ready to meet the onrushing horde. A man behind them was yelling, pointing- their commander, she assumed, whose red hair gleamed softly like a flickering fire as Ladislava approached his position.

The black-clad men would be overwhelmed by numbers, Ladislava's military mind calculated, though their defensive position was good... except there was one factor that might give them the edge.

A single heavy catapult, which was so big that even at this distance Ladislava could see that the thing was a jury-rigged mess of old wood and rusted metal, sat behind the lines of the soldiers. Somebody had painted the words _Mr. Bastard_ on its firing arm, visible from the air. It was crewed by warriors whose hurried actions kept it launching heavy stones at a rate far past what most such machines could manage, and consistently, too; you could count by it. One-two, three-four, five-six, seven-eight, _launch_.

The discipline to do that would have been impressive in the Adrestian military; for a mercenary band, it was beyond impressive. They loaded and fire relentlessly, the machine creaking with a sound like an oaken fist landing a haymaker as the deadly stones flew. The boulders flew over the civilians and crashed through the crowd of Allied troops, and though not every shot hit, every shot that hit killed, and slowed the charge's momentum. It moved like clockwork; one-two, three-four, five-six, seven-eight, _launch_.

Ladislava was a general at heart, and her instincts told her this would be a tight thing; if the Allied troops reached the line before their momentum broke, they would overwhelm the defenders... but if the catapult could wear the numbers down enough, slow and disrupt the charge, the entrenched soldiers might win. An uphill battle was no fun... what was the formula, three attackers to one defender? With no fortifications, you wouldn't need so many attackers, but there weren't _that_ many more Allied troops, and each time the catapult launched, there were less of them.

A tearing sound behind her moved her thoughts from the war beneath her and back towards her own predicament, as the beast lazily spat a gust of terrible wind that cut and seared. It passed her soldiers by, did no harm except panicking the wyverns; but it also made it terribly clear it was just toying with them. Soon, the wind would _not_ miss, and she had nothing to contend it with...

Except...

She stared at that catapult, firing and firing. At the banner, a deathly flag to serve under- but it looked like salvation and hope, in that moment, for her and her troop.

An idea...

“ Riders, keep flying dead ahead,” she ordered. “ I'm going to buy us time.”

“ Captain!” came the denying yell, but she did not hear it, was already pulling back hard on the reigns as she tugged a hatchet out of her saddle scabbard. A flying thing cannot actually stop, but whatever weird magic filled a wyvern let it hover, and the dragon wouldn't expect this.

She pulled back as her riders, despite their misgivings, obeyed her orders, darting ahead. The lazy dragon turned her head as Ladislava approached much faster than she had anticipated, its look of mild surprise turning to one of anger as she threw her hatchet at its face and cut it right above its beak.

_Come on_ , she thought, as she pulled her wyvern into a dive, _follow me, you fuck_.

She tugged her other hatchet out as she leaned into the dive, the dragon following, her dodging left and right at random, the zigzag taught to avoid arrows useful for dodging dragon breath too. The dragon's missed shots barreled downwards, plowing into the Alliance troops, but it did not care, it just focused on her. She threw her hatchet behind her, not knowing if it hit at all, just trying to make her focus on her alone.

Seeing a stone plow into the Alliance, she began to count as she angled her dive straight at the black-clad soldiers.

One-two.

Dodge left, dragon breath, plowing into the ground, not quite angled right yet.

Three-four.

Dodge left again, it had spat to the right, a shot missing, but now it was finally catching up, she could hear it _breathing_ behind her.

Five-six.

She heard those jaws snapping, no more wind, it sought to pluck her like a fruit from her wyvern's back and chomp down on her. She leaned forward, heard the clack-clack as the jaws just missed, looked back to see that great head looming right over her.

Seven-eight.

Goddess, she hoped their discipline was as good as she thought it was. The great mouth opened again.

_Launch_.

She dove straight down. Her wyvern screamed in complaint, muscles tearing from the sudden turn, but it worked; she dropped, and the wind dragon was left without prey as a great stone hurled directly at it.

It tried to dodge. Wings flared out, just as Ladislava's own wyvern flared its much smaller wings, trying to stop as it reangled from a fatal fall into a smoother crash... but neither were able to pull out of their course.

The great dragon was struck in the right wing, and fell, corkscrewing from the impact, twisting as it fell. Ladislava, too, fell, too close to the ground for her wyvern to stop, hitting hard, her wyvern shrieking as it broke some of its toes. She was thrown, the saddle as a whole coming loose and skidding to a stop with her as she rolled, finally collapsing in a heap right next to the black-clad troops.

Behind her, the much heavier form of the dragon plowed into the dirt, turning and turning, and ending up directly behind her and her fallen saddle.

She stood up, in pain but the adrenaline was fighting it off for now, looked- her hammer, impossibly, was still on her saddle. She tugged it free as the red-haired man, who on closer inspection was a ferociously ugly and scarred spectacle of humanity, ran forward.

“ Holy shit,” he said, eloquent as a poet. She turned to observe the dragon, and the strategist in her idly noted that her riders had stopped, paused to see the dragon fall, and that the Allied troops had paused, too, taken aback by the sudden collapse of a dragon.

“ Is it dead?” some woman in the black ranks asked, notching a huge crossbow as she spoke.

The great beast twitched, and an eye fluttered.

“ Shit, no it's not!” the red-haired man said- and ran towards it, Goddess, the balls on this man. He ran forward with the spear in his hand and struck it hard on the neck... but it was no good, the scales were too strong, he skidded off.

He looked back in frustration, and his eyes locked onto Ladislava and her hammer.

“ Nail!” the man said, spat it out. “ Nail!”

And Ladislava _got it_ , in that second she _understood_ , as the man put his spear to the dazed dragon's throat again. Nail, a nail, she had a hammer in her hand...

She ran up and swung her warhammer of good Enbarr steel. The spear's shaft, made of good Faerghi locustwood, held up to that hammering blast, and the speartip, of finest Fraldarian steel, sunk into the scale. The dragon's paws clenched and unclenched, the beast's daze wearing off; she was waking up.

“ Again!” the man yelled uselessly; she was already halfway through her second swing. Another resounding crack as Imperial hammer and Kingdom spear met Allied dragon, all of Fodlan's war contained in a single action, and the spear sank in further, the scale starting to shatter from the pressure, the way brittle boards did when something pierced them. The dragon's eyes blinked open, an expression of panic on its face.

Ladislava reared back one last time; she'd only get one more swing.

“ Come on!” the man exhorted- her or the spear, Ladislava wasn't sure.

She swung.

The hammer landed perfectly. The spear went through, the scale shattering like terracotta, splitting apart as her tremendous blow sent the spear in feet deep. Apparently dragons were soft under those scales...

Hot blood began to spray with the pressure of a rushing river. The beast roared in pain, and perhaps on instinct tried to blast them with its breath, aiming for the man holding the spear that had hurt her. Ladislava tackled the man, knocking him to the ground, and the flesh-stripping wind flew over both their heads and buried itself harmlessly in the dirt.

But harmless as the attack was to the both of them, it was deadly for the she-dragon. Her throat had bulged from the inner pressure when she released her deadly breath, and that had proven too much for her torn flesh. A much bigger hole then the spear had cut was torn in its flesh by that pressure, the spear pushed out and those veins bursting, and what had before been thin streams of high pressure became a veritable flood.

The dragon kicked, roared, made terrible noises like a songbird screaming... and, after a few moments useless thrashing, one claw pressed to the great wound, died.

Ladislava rose up. The man rose, too. They stared at the dragon, dead, there was a dragon dead at their hands, _they had killed a dragon._

She turned her stunned and disbelieving gaze to the man. He stared back, face full of slowly spreading delight.

“ We killed it,” she said. He laughed, a huge and healthy sound, like a big dog's friendly bark.

“ We killed it!” he echoed her, and for a moment they were not Adrestian or Faerghi, nor even strangers, but simply two people who had done the impossible, who were _dragonslayers._

They grabbed each other and danced the nameless dance of joy, spinning each other in place. They could do nothing else; there was a franticness to it, a frenetic sense of impossibility to what they had done that drove them a little wild, made it to where all they could do was spin and jump and engage in this madcap romp in each other's arms. The battlefield was stalled, everyone staring, as the two of them laughed and danced and whirled, no one able to really process what had just happened- that two ants had taken down a raging bull.

The woman with the crossbow laughed, and fired a deadly shot from her gigantic weapon that tore the head off an Allied knight.

“ Stronger than death!” she screamed as she reloaded, and the words were echoed in every throat as the black-clad soldiers charged.

The Alliance line trembled, but when the catapult fired again and sent a great stone through their ranks, that was it. They broke, fleeing, the dragon was _dead_ and that had never happened before, humans could not kill _dragons_... and if they could kill dragons, how could normal humans stand up to them?

They fled, and the Forgotten chased, cutting down any who resisted, the band of former bandits and thieves proving superior to these honorable knights of the Alliance. Their deathly banner, strangest symbol of heroism and safety, was soon the only one flying,

On the hill behind that battle, unaware of anything but the emotional rush of doing the impossible, the joyful madness of the first dragonslayers ended, and they looked each other in the eye as they held hands.

“ What's your name?” he asked, and she laughed, still drunk and dizzy on victory, realizing she did not know the name of the man whom she had done this great deed with.

“ Ladislava,” she said with a smile, and he smiled back at her. He was beautiful, in that moment, all his scars and the rough structure of his face gained a kind of dignity she hadn't expected, something unique and lovely, the way strange-looking animals sometimes had their own sublime and alien beauty.

“ That name's beautiful,” he said. “ I'm Miklan.”

(And as she will tell their half-dozen daughters, _that_ is how she met their father.)

Here is a story they tell in Faerghus.

“ The king had always liked Miklan, but it wasn't until him and Ladislava hooked up that he earned his nobility back. They killed a dragon- the first dragonslayers, can you imagine that? We know you can kill them now, but that was when the war began, we didn't know _anything._ And still Miklan and Ladislava managed to kill one. Goddess bless her for showing up when she did.”

“ Three cheers for the Forgotten and the Adrestians!”

“ Hear! Hear! Hear!”


	2. Of the Fourth House: Fleche and the Ashen Wolves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Saw the Ashen Wolves, and decided to adapt them to my setting. Who knows how lore-accurate this'll be; but this is how the Abyss and the Ashen Wolves worked in my setting. 
> 
> Also, really wanted to write some stuff about Fleche.
> 
> TW: Lots and LOTS of killing in this one. Death, mental illness (Fleche is not doing her best), and torture abound. One of the bad guys is a pedophile, and his past abuses are mentioned, but nothing present in the story itself. Still, this is a dark chapter, and nothing wrong with ducking out.

**Of the Fourth House**

**Fleche's Paralogue**

**Hunting with Wolves**

Ordnance against Terrorist Activities

Painting the symbol of the Black Eagles, or any of their associated slang or mottos, on any surface in Enbarr is punishable by death.

Report any sightings of such activity to your local Allied guard.

By Decree of Archduke Varley of the Leceister Alliance

\- _Enbarr Occupational Decree 980_

A year and a half into Enbarr's occupation, the city continued on, but in a greatly wounded state, the great beast of a city limping along and bleeding out. Riches were taken every day, citizens rounded up as conscripts to throw at Faerghus, and the city's industry was bent entirely to supporting the Allied war effort, leaving nothing for its people. Death was common, inflicted out of hand as part of the Alliance's brutal suppression tactics, squads of their soldiers- human and dragon alike- descending into the town to take and take from the populace without fear of restraint.

Still, some things stayed true, even in the black and red city suffering under the touch of gold and white. The slums, for one thing, managed to hang on, though with far fewer people these days. The worst slums in the city were located along the long, low cliff edges that dangled into the sea, dangling beneath Enbarr in a long line like hooks dangling from fishing lines. They were located in precarious places that people with a choice avoided; it was too easy to fall into the deep waters below, or to be _pushed_ , should someone take such a notion. Further, it was wet, constantly, and in a storm, the cliffside slums always faced the worst of it- and Goddess, should it flood, entire familes would be washed away, swept like filth being scoured from a wall by the water's fury.

The only civil facilities truly present were sewer systems, built by Edelgard's grandmother during her reign, an act done to cut down on the plagues that kept erupting inside these communities- the sewers were small and barely functional, but it had still slowed the recurring bouts of disease that swept up from the cliff slums and into Enbarr proper, so their purpose was served.

On such kindnesses did the slums persist, rebuilt every time. There were always more poor people, bums and orphans to trickle down here in times of trouble- and troubled times were here, indeed. The derelict and the downtrodden needed homes, and they needed places to drink and forget their troubles, so the two most common buildings on the cliffs were slapped-together shanties and semi-functional bars. They squatted like thin and hungry barnacles on the side of the cliff, perched precariously against the sea and the greater city of Enbarr above them both.

In one such slopped-up bar in those cliffside slums, a small maiden sat in a back corner, and whispered quietly to herself.

“ But brother... everyone else is talking that way... it's just how Enbarr's underground talks... I know it's not proper Adrestian, but I like it... Slade talks that way!... We are Adrestians, we can go right into the cant... erry person down in the dark speaks like this, and it didna stop them from being right fine to us... oh, here he comes, we musts be quiet...”

She slipped into silence upon seeing the man- her target- enter the bar. He was an Alliance official, and quite handsome to look at, the kind of man who attracted a lot of attention from others- particularly when he was wearing his usual clothes, the great draping gold of a high-ranking nobleman, a firstborn son come to Enbarr to manage the Alliance's newest territory.

But he wore no gold today. He was wearing a hood and a cloak of beige, his clothes underneath the light reds of those who could not change their outfits for Enbarr's new masters. He was pretending to be a common Adrestian, even a poor one, and but for the fact that Fleche had been tailing him for two weeks, she'd believe it.

He'd come here in disguise, following a rumor of certain deviant pleasures available at this bar, things that even the Alliance could not stomach in its officials. He was hiding himself, not from the underground resistance, but from his own government.

If they knew what he did in private, they'd kill him. Rhea didn't have care or concern for what humans did to each other, but the Alliance had rules that existed long before Rhea began to whisper in their ears, things any decent government opposed- and be all the sins of its new self remembered, the Alliance was once the best of Fodlan's three nations.

The Duke of Dragons may be the servant of abomination, but not all things of the Alliance belong to Rhea. This man's tastes ran to the grotesque, and in a country run by the savage, he would be hunted down as a monster, if anyone knew of his true hungers, the pleasure he took in inflicting harm on the innocent.

The man knew this, and so hid himself. What he did not know was this: the rumors he sought after were false, planted by Enbarr's rebel network. He does not know that the little girl he was coming here to meet was no toy or pet, but his death.

Fleche grinned when she saw him, remembering the argument about using her as bait, the way Yuri had acknowledged the sense of it but hated putting the burden on her. Fleche had settled the matter by simply volunteering for it, which shut down all further argument. Randolph had agreed that it was best for her to go.

Somebody so much like his other victims should be the one to put him down- or flat, as Enbar's underground slang would say.

_Don't use that tongue_ , Randolph nagged her, but she didn't respond, her target was close. He sat down in her booth, and looked her over.

“ I believe you are the lovely darling I am here to meet?” the Alliance official said to her quietly. “ You're a bit older than usual, but you _are_ quite petite for your age.”

Randolph chuckled in the corner of Fleche's eyes, sharpening an axe. Fleche smiled at the man, nodded to him- and kept her hands on the knives her brother had given her, his last gift, before the servants had taken her into the dark, before...

(The dragon over him, Randolph dying by inches, it had taken him hours to die, the thing had _smiled_ , she had screamed until there was no more word in her throat just endless dry hissing _pain_ )

She was gone, for a second.

When she returned, the man had suggested moving this somewhere more private, with the lecher's taint on that last word. She agreed, but made him pay, first, haggling over the price, claiming her master would not like it if she did not turn a profit. That part, that part he liked, it made the fantasy real for him; once he paid, he was hers.

She pocketed the gold, and then led him to a room the resistance had prepared.

When he opened the door, Balthus was there, already in a fighting stance.

“ Greetings, motherfucker!” the big man said cheerfully, and laid the man out with a single punch.

“ Why are you like this?” Hapi's whine wondered from behind him.

-

Balthus and Hapi took up the task of both tying the politician up and hauling him bodily back to base, while Fleche took point. The seedy bar- Drunkard's Dive by name, the most on-the-nose epithet for a bar in history- had no entrances to the true undercity, but a nearby apartment building, abandoned for almost a decade, did. With Fleche running lookout, the trio managed to get their quarry underground, passing through territory that had once belonged to numerous gangs- most of whom had been wiped out when the Alliance took over. The Alliance did not play around, and unlike Enbarr's former government, had an invested interest in rooting out dissent.

A form of evolution had been at work, which Fleche had been able to watch, having been placed in the dark the day before the Empire died. What had once been a multitude of gangs of all types, ranging from the drug runners and weapon smugglers to noble defenders of neighborhoods and justified vigilantes, had been forced by natural selection to become stronger, smarter, stealthier... or die. Varley was many things, but- to the great misfortune of Enbarr's people- _incompetent_ he was not. He'd even come down there himself, had bloodied himself on screaming human meat, amusing himself with violence.

From the former many had come, in just a year and a half's time, just one- the resistance. Every other faction had either joined up or died. These tunnels, once home to multitudes, were quiet now, home only to rats... both literally and, in the case of the trio, figuratively. The two Wolves carried the unconscious man and their torches, while Fleche scouted ahead. The tunnels were small this close to the surface, just stone-lined paths of filthy water barely tall enough for a human to stand in; poor places to have a fight, especially when carrying an unconscious person.

She moved ahead, without torchlight, feeling her way in the dark, listening- and looking for the gleam of light that meant people. The tunnels closest to the surface had no light at all, so if she could see even a dim glow, that meant somebody was carrying a light with them, be it a blazing torch or magelight.

She listened, too, her ears scouts of their own. Noises got distorted underground, but if you lived there long enough, you learned to compensate, to figure out which bouncing voice was actually nearby and which was just echoing from farther away.

She heard words... but far away, bouncing off multiple walls. She couldn't see a light, either, and between that and the distortion... it was safe, most likely. Nothing was ever certain... but you had to keep moving, anyway.

She crawled back to the Wolves, and they continued, following a path they'd memorized religiously, turning and twisting and winding, entering a final downward slope, a dull background roar growing as they walked down the last of the sewer tunnels.

At tunnel's end, they stepped out, their torchlight revealing only a vast, empty darkness, as the roar resolved itself into the sounds of the sea. This was a natural cavern, which Enbarr's most recent sewer architects had designated as an end-point for some of the city's water. The tunnel opened on a huge vista of emptiness, the sewer ending on a small outcrop of stone which immediately resolved itself into a steep plunge to waters so far below that torchlight did not reveal them.

To their right, carved long ago by pirates into the stone, was a set of stairs. There was even a handrail, because somebody hadn't wanted anyone to slip and fall, the old wood still strong despite the ever-present wet, preserved with some magic or another.

Pirates, yes, but _Adrestian_ pirates, you see, which explained the magic.

Down at the bottom of those stairs was a light, revealing a small pier and a tied boat floating in the rough waters- as well as a boatman, sitting on a crate, smoking.

Fleche carried both torches now, as the Wolves had their hands full with their victim. Down the steps they went, down, down, until they reached their destination.

Slade, long-time thief, recent rebel, had a smirk on his ratlike face right as the trio reached him.

“All's well?” the thief asked, flicking his cigarette into the waters.

“ Yes,” Fleche said. Randolph, next to her, said _It really is._ “ We got him.”

“ Alright,” Slade said, as he helped put the man in the boat.

“ Ugh,” Hapi complained as she slumped down into the small raft, grabbing the middle pair of oars. Fleche sat behind her, propping the unconscious Alliance official up in a lean onto her shoulder; they didn't have room to lay him down flat. “ Why didn't Yuri come along? I'm a mage, I'm not cut out for all this hard labor.”

Balthus chuckled as he settled down and grabbed the rearmost pair of oars. “ That's why you should learn healing magic. Yuri's busy fixing people up, he doesn't have to do gruntwork like we do most days.”

“ Uuuugh,” Hapi commented eloquently, as Slade took up the front pair of oars.

“ Alright, stow your barking, Wolves. Let's get rowing home,” Slade said.

“ You know, wolves can't bark, actually,” Hapi said, as the trio shoved off and started rowing against the current. “ That's what one of the books we stole from Garreg Mach said, anyway! They just howl, they can't bark. The naturalist writing it claimed that was proof dogs were the superior species.”

“ Fuck that guy,” Balthus said as the trio rowed. Randolph shook his head at the foul-mouthed man, and Fleche giggled.

Balthus grinned at her and, in a tone of farce, said “ What? I gotta defend the honor of the Ashen Wolves, the secret fourth House of Garreg Mach!”

“ There was no such thing!” Hapi complained. “ Goddess' smoking coffin, I should have slapped the teeth out of you and Yuri when you started up with all that. We weren't the secret fourth house! Rhea didn't even know we existed, I bet. We were like, the local goblins, we'd crawl out at night and steal stuff.”

Balthus cracked up. “ Remember that purple haired girl who saw us once?”

Hapi put her hand to her forehead. “ The one that Yuri told, 'just ignore us, we're ghosts?!?' That one?”

Balthus laughed uproariously, his voice drwoned in the sound of the sea. “ Yep!”

Things wer quiet a moment, the only light the lamp on the boat's front, guiding them up this river. They were making slow but steady progress, even Balthus' mighty arms finding the current hard to fight as they continued upriver. This underground trail of water was one of the only routes to their secret city, a winding and surprisingly deep path that cut through the stone. Sometimes, the limestone was close enough to touch...

As Fleche reached a hand out, idly brushing the wall as the Allied nobleman slumped in sleep beside her, Randolph scratched his chin beside her. _I remember telling you about them, Fleche- the rumors, even in my time, about people living in the Abyss..._

_“_ I remember that, brother,” Fleche said, as she withdrew her hand after touching the rough stone. Her compatriots, who knew her, ignored the comment to a ghost. “ Balthus, Hapi, you lived in the Abyss, right? My brother just reminded me that he told me a story about that, once. Rumors of people living under Garreg Mach in a place called Abyss...”

“ No rumor,” Balthus said. “ I should know, I was one of 'em. We didn't start the tradition- people been living in the Abyss for decades, centuries even. Sometimes we'd stumble on some long-lost hallway that had writings in it from people who I'd _guess_ you'd call our ancestors, in the sense that they lived there once, too... found a few graves down there, too. Bones that had never seen the light of day...”

“ Still can't believe we got out alive,” Hapi muttered as she rowed. Despite her slimness, Hapi was a survivor, like all the Wolves, and there was surprising strength in the skinny woman's arms. “ When the surface dwellers attacked... that bloody bastard Claude. Traitor! He knew about us, hell, we did business with him! And then when he took Garreg Mach he sent the dragons down after us, in the dark..”

( Unbeknownst to either group, the Blue Lions and the Ashen Wolves had crossed paths while running during those last desperate hours, had in fact been running beside each other in the upper layers of the sewers, separated by a thin wall. As Ashe led the Pride out, Yuri had been hunting down his Pack, and the two groups had nearly collided. The littlest things separate our paths, at times...)

Randolph shook his head. _Fuck dragons, and fuck Claude_.

“ Yes, brother,” Fleche said. “ Fuck dragons, and fuck Claude.”

“ Agreed,” Balthus said with a laugh.

Fleche turned to him, and tried on a smile, awkward on her face after so long without. “ I'm glad you guys got out ok.”

Balthus smiled back at her. “ Me too. This place feels a lot like home, to be honest. Living underground, running a black market- really, this is just a much more coastal version of our old home!”

“ So I meant to ask about that,” Slade said, as their slow journey up the underground river turned a bend, and light could be seen glinting warmly in the distance. “ How'd ya'll get down here?”

He nodded his head towards the maiden, though his eyes stayed on Balthus. “ I know how little Fleche made it, I was there when her family dragged her down here, but how'd you Wolves end up in Adrestia?”

“ That's the fault of a dude named Pallardo,” Balthus replied. “ He was a merchant at Garreg Mach who we did a lot of business with. Apparently he was on Claude's side from the start, though... but he didn't like wiping us out. He grew a conscience and warned us just in time; we were able to get most of our people out. Don't know what happened to him next; heard a bunch of rumors. Some even claim he signed up with the Emperor and her Black Eagles...”

Randolph scoffed, and Fleche nodded to him.

“ The Black Eagles aren't real,” Fleche said.

“ Hey, let's not have this discussion again-” Slade and Balthus both started.

“ I like to think they're real,” Hapi said, ignoring them. “ How do you know they're not real?”

Randolph rolled his eyes, and Fleche nodded. “ As Randolph put it once, Hapi, I... I mean, wouldn't our Emperor be the _first_ person the Alliance killed?”

“ I don't believe the newspapers,” Hapi said. “ The Alliance lies all the time, why would we believe them about this?”

“ Because it's sensible,” Fleche said, and did not have to look to know Hapi was shaking her head.

“ We saw Edelgard sometimes, when we were running around on the surface. Heard about her, too. She was always really powerful, and her Black Eagles were tough, too... I believe in her.”

Randolph shrugged. Fleche did too. She hadn't believed in dreams since the day she saw her brother die, and realized them for what they were- happy thoughts of darkness, the sweet shadow lying to you so you could sleep.

No, the truth was the noonday sun; the truth was her brother, peeled like an apple, up from his feet, for the dragon's pleasure.

She blanked out again, just for a second, as Randolph's visage shifted into the ragged thing he had been when he finally died, when his incredible constitution and strength finally could no longer hold out... she'd never been grateful to be fairly frail before, but seeing how a strong man could die for ages taught her many things.

When she came to again, they were coming into port.

The heart of Enbarr's underground was a saltwater soaked spit of rock on which pirates, bastards, ne'er-do-wells, and scoundrels had built a haven. A small area, located in a large underground cave that connected with the sea through several small rivers, it had existed more or less since Enbarr was big enough to support an underworld worth fighting over.

They called it Enbrine, some wit having come up with the name years before, though other names proliferated- the Undersea, Darkwater, and the Wolves had called it Salty Abyss for three months before threats got them to stop. It was an imposing little place, squat with walls and weapons; multiple buildings had been carefully constructed over long years down here, mostly fortifications.

This was no place for pleasure palaces or great mansions. This was where the underworld- now the Enbarr Resistance- did _business_ , and it was in every criminal's best interests that the place be defensible. Different mobsters had ruled the place over the years, as criminal powers waxed and waned; now it belonged to a coalition of former nobles and pirates, whose only united goal was the death of the Alliance.

As they approached, two of the guards at the pier drew bows on them from a watchtower, itself rooted onto a small rock sticking out of the water.

“ Identify yourselves,” one said gruffly.

“ It's us,” Balthus said. “ Ashen Wolves are back, and Fleche. We've got ourselves a little dragon-fucker!”

“ Well, he's not a _dragon_ fucker, that's kind of why our trap worked,” Fleche noted, and all three adults around her shuddered.

“ Holy shit, Fleche,” Hapi said, as the guards laughed and helped them hitch up their boat. “ You're a baby, how are you the scariest thing down here?”

-

They delivered the man to the council after that, the council paying them well for a job done swiftly. He had information they wanted; rumors persisted of an upcoming sweep of the sewers, and this man was the one in charge. They needed details so they could avoid it, and keep any interlopers from discovering Enbrine.

Extracting the information wasn't Fleche's job. She couldn't bring herself to torture anyone, not after seeing her brother suffer; it was one reason she was so good at killing. She didn't like seeing people in pain, had to cut it out of them, pull their life out quick so the screaming stopped. She was fast, not like _the dragon_.

There was no work to be done, so Fleche had gotten her daggers resharpened, then turned the Wolves down when they offered to take her back to the Den to celebrate. She had no interest in that.

She instead hitched a ride back to her own private furnishings. Enbrine was where the resistance did its work, where armories were kept, prisoners executed, and plans made... but people actually _lived_ in the ruins that surrounded it. Enbrine was too small to maintain housing, so people lived in a ring around it, moving about on little boats.

The skiff that carried her back had been crewed by some of the lower nobility of House Hevring, who had disagreed with their matriarch over joining with House Varley's betrayal. She had summarily kicked them out, but it had done nothing to dampen their courageous spirit; in a spirit of merry spite, they took up the name of House Hevring in Exile, and the green-haired healers were some of the resistance's most valuable personnel. Not everyone in the Exiles of Hevring could heal when this started, but they'd all picked it up fast enough, and now the green hair was a sure sign that healing was nearby. One even asked if she needed assistance as she got on the boat.

She'd shaken her head, though the dead Goddess knew she'd needed it before. One did not become an assassin without a few mistakes, even one doomed to survive. They settled down in one of the innumerable small caverns that littered the underground, their boat tied to an ancient brass hitch that had been old before Fleche was born, and they parted ways, the Hevrings in Exile having taken up residence in a crumbling hotel from a prior incarnation of Enbarr, one they'd converted into a hospital.

Her preferred abode was farther out. She passed people as she went, these roads under the city littered with debris in the shape of human lives- raiders and ravagers, now joined by nobles and soldiers, no one comfortable with the arrangement but all united by the twin desires of survival and victory.

For now, at least, the resistance was united.

From this criminal clay and aristocratic alloy had been forged a rebellion; not much of one, Varley hunted them every day, and they scraped and fought for even the few victories they had... but so far, they had clung to life here, in these decaying places. Enbarr was the oldest city in Fodlan and nowhere was that more apparent than beneath it; each building in Enbarr was built on the bones of older houses, sinking deep into the earth. Even Enbrine had been built with materials removed from these ancient ruins, taken like ore from a mine. Many of the layers had collapsed, but the ancient stuff of Agartha still stood the test of time.

One such place was Fleche's favored haunt. She had no idea why, save that it was just a bit off the beaten paths. The main camp, centered on the Hevring's hospital, was a little too noisy for her. She preferred what she believed to have originally been a restaurant, the crumpled area suggestive of a dining room with a long serving bar, though so much was decayed that it might just be a fantasy. Sometimes Randolph amused himself by pretending to serve drinks along it.

Beside the ruin of that long serving bar, or whatever it had been, the place had a small back room whose door was still functional. Next to that door was a small basket, a barrel, and on what had once been a dining table, a stack of towels next to a stack of relatively clean clothing. Past that, in a distant corner standing over a small, semi-grated hole, was another barrel.

The barrels held water- the first, near her bedroom, had clean freshwater for drinking, the other in the far corner had saltwater to bathe in. One had a copper dipping handle with House Aegir's mark on it, a gift from Constance; the other had a sponge on a stick that Hapi had gifted her. The barrels themselves were Yuri's gift; once the Wolves had chosen to effectively adopt her, they had brought to their feral pup all kinds of things.

She'd had servants on arriving, of course, but time had a way of wearing down her loved ones. Attritio had been high in the early days of their arrival, before they knew what they were doing, when they stumbled over even simple tasks; Varley was an opponent that required you to bring your best, and they had not known what was best, in those days. It had slowed now, but only because of hard lessons learned on the corpses of family and friends.

Lessons harder for Bergliez to learn than anyone. A House of proud warriors, of Eagles sailing gaily over death and destruction; to roost like bats in the dark had rankled, to move and act like rats had tormented. Her House had bled dry early on, her unable to lead due to youth and trauma, and her regents soldiers and generals who did not understand just how to fight this kind of war, who were used to war being a thing of unit composition and numbers, not this desperate guerilla war of individuals and opportunity.

They died, and soon, what had been a House of dozens was reduced to ten; and they had sought to leave her. New paths, new roads, opened up before them, and they did not want the heavy anchor of a dead House on their backs.

Fleche had been unaware of much for a long time, but she was starting to wake up at that time, returning to herself at Randolph's gentle urging, and she was kind to them; she set them free. She freed them from their oaths of loyalty, so they did not have to betray her to go become the people they wanted to be.

Fleche wished them well. She saw no reason not to, and no reason to keep them. A House of ten was not a House, it was a fantasy. Bergliez was just a fable now, same as the Black Eagles.

She hoped she would not have to see them die, but knew that her curse would probably make it so. It was part of why she isolated herself. Her curse was a devastating thing, clever in its cruelness.

She was cursed, you see, to _live_. A curse of life. She loved so many people, and she was destined to outlive them all. It was a conclusion she'd come to when she realized that despite all the death haunting her family, she always managed to survive.

She was doomed to live. What a terrible thing; she would watch everyone die, in the end. Her destiny was to live on in torment.

How else could one explain her victories in battle? She was raised by warriors, but her real training had only just begun when the Empire died and her world ended.

Yet when she had begun to seek out targets- when she had started killing, if only because doing nothing was driving her more mad than she already was- she survived. She had done the first as a suicide run, hunting down an Allied soldier who had bragged of taking down her brother.

She hadn't expected to survive, had in fact hoped she wouldn't... but by sheer dumb luck, not only did she find the right man, she caught him in the middle of taking a piss.

She'd sank her brother's daggers, his last gifts to her, deep into that man's throat, and he gurgled his last. She'd walked back home, no one in his squad any the wiser, his body only found in the morning.

It kept going like that. She learned, of course. She started stalking her prey, for days, watching. Learning. Routines and habits and all the little details.

In time, her trembling, novice hands had proven adept at the deadly work. When she had started this a year ago, everyone down here had been convinced she would die... she still remembered how the Wolves had tried to stop her, save her. She'd escaped from them, kept up the killings, and though they were always scared for her, little Fleche came back, again and again.

It got to the point that the one thing people knew about Fleche down here was that, if she marked someone as a target, that person was going to die.

It was why she had the job she did now. The council gave her targets, she killed them, and she got paid. Killing for pay- a contract killer. She was an assassin for hire. How had it come to this? She remembered her life as a dream someone else had once dreamed. Randolph taking tea with her when she was little felt like it happened in another world, her father's big voice encouraging her as she trained with the practice axe was another life. The way her mom liked playing chess with her, days of play and happiness... how could they have ever been? How could she have ever been that little girl?

Her family had once told her she displayed a good tactical mind, were working on her strategy, hoped to make an officer of her one day... but look at her now, last daughter of Bergliez, who could not even command herself.

Whoever Fleche could have been, that person never was... there was just... this, now. A professional murderer. A paid killer. The eternal assassin, who could not die.

( Fleche did not know this, but her own conviction that she could not die was itself part of why she was still alive; fearless of death, she committed herself fully to all of her attacks, held nothing back, and so she struck harder and faster than anyone expected. And she was odd, she didn't react like people normally did; heedless of harm, she did not pause or relent, would do anything to get her strikes into her target. To those used to how most people acted, it was enough to throw them off for a few crucial seconds, long enough for her daggers to find veins.)

The only things she did that _weren't_ killing were the little missions Yuri hired her for, like this last one. It was the way the House leader of the Ashen Wolves- which wasn't a House at all- tried to take care of her, hiring her to help with missions that did not involve blood spurting from sliced arteries and the sound of a person's last breath escaping them. He'd hired her once just to watch their lair, a strange old church buried deep in the earth, that they had refurbished and named the Wolf's Den.

But he should stay away from her. She stayed away from people for her own sake. She... she didn't want to see Yuri die, or any of the other Wolves, who were so kind to her, who...

Goddess. She tried to drive them away and still they came, loyal; if nothing else, they copied that trait of their wolfish namesake, that quality they had in spades. The Wolves insisted on watching her, some protective instinct born of how they'd treated the younger kids who had drifted down into the Abyss during the days of Garreg Mach.

She was grateful for it. Without them, she wouldn't have any people to talk to at all...

She shook her head. She stank of shit, she was tired, she... she needed sleep.

She took off her dirty clothes and boots and laid them in the basket, where they'd keep until she dragged them to the local cleaning lady, the wife of a pirate who made a bit of extra coin keeping clothes clean. How she did it, Fleche didn't want to know, though she suspected and hoped magic was involved.

More carefully, she removed her knife harnesses, the armstrap ones she'd stolen from an Alliance soldier she'd killed, which Balthus had paid a blacksmith to modify to fit her brother's daggers.

( Another kindness. The Wolves reached out to this lonely pup... but she was poison, her curse, she did not want to watch them die, so she withdrew, even as she desperately ached for those kindnesses.)

The daggers she laid within easy reach. She was isolated out here, and there was only one path to her home through the jumbled maze of collapsed buildings that made up Enbarr's underground, but there was no excuse for sloppiness. She couldn't die, but she could definitely suffer.

She wiped herself off with the saltwater and the sponge, soaping up with some fancy thing of Leceister she'd stolen on one of her jobs. She let the dirty water spill down into the hole, which led to the lake around Enbrine. You always cleaned after a trip in the sewers, or you got to suffer a _great_ deal, if not outright die, though that latter didn't apply to her. Some even said the saltwater was good for cleaning, though Fleche suspected the use of ocean water for bathing was just because it was the one resource in Enbrine that they had a literal neverending supply of. It left salt on her skin and hair, but some vigorous toweling removed the irritant, left her as clean as anyone down here ever got.

Ablutions finished, she slipped into an old shirt Balthus had given her, a huge, buttoned-up thing that he'd stolen from Garreg Mach once- apparently he was looking for a shirt for himself, but after discovering it didn't fit, he'd kept it by accident until he saw she needed more clothes.

It fit her entire body like a long robe; Randolph laughed as he saw her put it on. _Whoever wore that was a huge son of a bitch,_ he quipped.

“ He must have been a Knight of Seiros,” Fleche agreed. “ The biggest one they had!”

( Many miles away, Raphael, traveling with his fellow Eagles, had the strangest feeling someone was talking about him, then shrugged and dismissed it, the way he'd once dismissed losing a shirt in the laundry during his fourth month at Garreg Mach. Stuff happened, right?)

She was a little hungry, but that didn't matter. Hapi always told her she didn't eat enough, but Hapi also thought the Black Eagles were real, and not a fairy tale. Fleche admittedly saw the hope it must give to believe in them, but... well. Truth was truth.

_A shame, though,_ Randolph said, answering her unspoken thoughts. _I'd like for Caspar to be alive._

Caspar... a memory of her short little nephew, of his passion and his power, something like fire at its purest. Caspar blazed, hot as his blue hair... but no, he had to be dead. The Alliance had taken Enbarr in a day, how could a bunch of teenagers and students hold out?

Still... hmm. She would pray for him. The Goddess was dead, they said- but they said Randolph was dead, too, so what did they know?

“ Goddess,” she began, but then she remembered one of Caspar's last letters, about revival and revelations, a letter Randolph had not let her read... but one which she, in a fit of mischief, had stolen anyway. A letter he had begun hesitantly, but which carried all the truth Caspar could tell, lies and subtlety having never been his forte. Fleche had been wondering what the letter meant, up until the dragon's coming meant there was no more wonder left inside her.

“ Goddess-in-Byleth,” she whispered to the dark, “ please watch over Caspar, if he still lives.”

( At Garreg Mach, something tried to respond... but there was no fire to burn, there was nothing inside, would be nothing inside until a great sacrifice, when a holy woman of the west would slit her own throat with an arrow, and the sacrifice would begin all things again. For now, though, there were but ashes inside, the same way there were only ashes where Edelgard had once been...)

No answer, but she hadn't expected any, and after grabbing her knives, she slipped into the little backroom. It had been a storage closet, she thought, or perhaps an employee entrance, but now it was just a room with a solid door. On the floor was her bed, a collection of tarps laid down in layers, covered in quilts and blankets, with a single pillow, which she'd stolen from an outpost of Varley's men on a mission. Some of the Hevrings in particular had celebrated the pointless theft when she'd returned, proud she'd struck against the traitor- which Fleche thought was ridiculous. She'd just wanted a pillow. Wasn't like Varley would even notice it was missing.

She locked her door, and laid down, knives under her pillow, falling into dreams of better days, dreaming of the woman she might have become, had all this not happened.

-

She wasn't sure when the knock came on the door. Might have been a day. At most, two. Sometimes she lost track of time, especially when she slept, but the Wolves kept watch on her and never let her go more than two days without contact.

( A welcome annoyance; she had almost starved to death by accident once. Food simply... she just didn't feel hungry, anymore. To eat was necessary, but she had to remind herself to do so.)

She woke up with a start, her brain switching from sleep to wakefulness with the suddenness of hard experience. Door being knocked on- _pounded_ on, this was frantic. Something was wrong. She arose.

“ Who's there?” she said, drawing her daggers.

“ It's me, Constance,” the Wolf at her door said. “ Come on, we've got trouble!”

“ What happened?” Fleche asked, as she opened the door for the dark flier.

“ Yuri's been caught,” she said, and Fleche's breath caught in her throat.

Randolph gazed in horror beside her.

-

The size of the trouble was this: Yuri had been taken.

He had been meeting with his lover, an Agarthan preacher and dark mage named Odesse. Yuri's boyfriend was a powerful figure, a traveling rebel who had recently arrived in Enbarr proper and proven to be beloved by the people; he claimed to be a bishop, despite being many years too young to claim that title, and he preached in Enbarr against the Alliance, his deep, grating tones full of vitriol against the Church of Seiros. The Alliance hunted him, but he always escaped, hiding in broad daylight by wearing a mask styled after classical Agarthan artifacts, surviving on the benevolence of the people.

Odesse had traveled far to reach Enbarr, and his preaching relied heavily on tales of the Black Eagles that he'd picked up in his journeys; Fleche had listened once, while following a separate target. He spoke of how Saint Cethleann was returned, of how dragons fought alongside Edelgard, and he exhorted those who heard him to turn their lives around, too; it was said a few had, that they left Enbarr and flew north, to join Saint Cethleann and be forgiven their sins under Seiros.

Fleche hadn't found him very convincing. If the Black Eagles were a fairy tale, the idea of Saint Cethleann's tribe returned to the earth was a farce. Dragons did not... they did not do good things.

( Randolph, _the dragon_ had peeled him like an apple, feet up, her brother had been in _pieces_ when he died...)

Fleche shook herself as she heard Constance relay what had happened. Odesse was bringing someone to meet Yuri, someone _important_.

But something had gone wrong. The Alliance had found and caught them all three, both the important person as well as the dark mage and the trickster.

Worse, the person who had them was Metodey. He was a nobody, a minor noble who had major appetites for power and destruction, whose awfulness was such that Archduke Varley- who had been knocked down from calling himself Emperor, since the Leceister Alliance didn't work like that- had appointed him as his personal enforcer. Metodey, who had power and abused it regularly.

Somebody has to save them.

Fleche nodded.

“ What do you need me to do?”

“ Get all the help you can,” Constance said. “ I know you work solo, mostly, but there has to be _something_ you can draw on that's not an idea we've already had.”

She pondered, then nodded.

“ I might.”

The Wolves have taken care of her; now it's her turn.

\- 

Fleche set out to find the last servants of House Bergliez.

They'd been grateful, at the time, when she released them. They'd even promised to help her if she ever asked, though she had yet to do so, a full year later.

Now it was time to see if they meant it.

Things were a'moving in the underground, people in a panic all in the crumbling halls; the Wolves were some of the sharpest teeth the resistance had, and Yuri's capture was a huge deal. People kept asking her about it- she was a Wolf, right?

( The common wisdom for it, given how the Wolves doted on her.)

...No, but right now... her anger at the thought of Yuri being hurt or killed... oh, she felt as angry as any Wolf did, with their Alpha in danger...

_Perhaps right now,_ Fleche thought, _I might just be an honorary Wolf._

Randolph nodded his approval at her thoughts. He had always wanted her to be safe, and the Pack could help keep her safe... but only if the Pack survived. Yuri's death would shatter it..

To keep that from happening, she made her way into forgotten places, hunting the past.

-

Of the ten who had been left, seven would not go. One had an excuse; she was pregnant. Fair enough.

The other six simply would not help her, claimed they were too busy, couldn't help, or that they owed her nothing; one had even mocked her.

“ Heard about you. People claim you're some deadly assassin; I don't believe it. You were a little fucking shit, and now you're a _crazy_ little fucking shit. Your stupid brother got himself killed and led us all into this shithole, when he could have turned Adrestia over to Varley and we'd all be living the high life. Not like dying helped us any! Fuck him, fuck you, and fuck Duke Aegir, he's the bastard who convinced Randolph to die on a fool's errand. Not that Randolph needed much help offing himself, he was a fucking moron.”

He'd laughed harshly, and Fleche's heart had nearly shattered. So had Randolph's, though his face was furious. She'd remembered this man as a kindly butler, always ready to help with a gentle word...

“ What happened to you?” she asked quietly. “ You were always so kind...”

He'd sneered.

“ I was _paid_ to be kind, you stupid little shit. Goddess, I always knew you were stupid. I was a servant, that's how it works. Now fuck off. I'd heard good things about the Wolves, but I'll be honest, if you're the best he can come up with to go around asking for help, Yuri must be as fucking stupid as Randolph was.”

Apparently, she'd never known him at all.

She'd nodded to him, then grabbed his hand and broke his wrist. While he was screaming, she broke the other one, then shattered his nose for good measure.

Then she walked away, and enjoyed the sound of him screaming. Randolph had admonished her for it, but fuck that guy for what he'd said about her brother and about Yuri. She hadn't been a good noble to her House, she couldn't complain about his ranting towards her; but he didn't get to talk about either of _them_ like that.

Nobody did.

( The man would, eventually, go to the Hevrings, who would heal him- and when he explained the situation, told him that he was lucky to be alive. They confirmed every rumor he'd heard about her deadly skill, having hired her themselves to kill members of their own family who had sided with Varley, and there was even debate within the exiled House about healing him at all. The man spent two nervous weeks waiting for an attack that never came. He was not a bad man, precisely, but had been rendered terrible and vicious in the wake of his family's death in the occupation; and in time, he came to think of the incident as the universe warning him about what direction he was heading in, a warning he decided to heed. He turned his rage to more worthy targets, and took up work with the resistance, though Fleche and him would never meet again.)

But while seven could or would not help, three would. A former maid, now making a living as a high-class prostitute and doing marvelously well as a source of information and funds for the resistance; a footman, who had been working as a pirate and happened to be in town this week; and to her surprise, the meanest of her former servants, a great she-bear of a cook who had hugged her, and asked her forgiveness for abandoning her.

That surprised Fleche, even more than her former butler's cruelty. The woman had been arrogant superiority incarnate before, had never liked Fleche for being young and stupid and always in her kitchen; but apparently Fleche had never known her, either, for now the woman simply apologized for abandoning her, and swore her oaths to Bergliez again, and offered up anything she had to help.

Perhaps she had not known these people as well as she'd hoped, not when she was their lord. Perhaps only now could she know them as people.

With that revelation in mind, and this strangest gaggle of support in hand, she went back to the Wolves, and while planning had always been Yuri's forte, Hapi was able to do him proud.

-

The three former servants prove their value almost immediately. The former maid knew Metodey, mostly by reputation- a vicious sadist, the kind of man whose body did not respond unless someone else's was bleeding. Prostitutes lived in terror that he would pick them, because most didn't survive, and those that did regretted it.

He was supposedly of House Vestra, to the surprise of many; he had been the one to betray them, word was, had done it on the promise of an endless array of human lives to torment. He was especially fond of fire, they'd heard...

But beyond the monstrosity of the man, they learned that he had a favored haunt for his long executions- an abandoned area of Enbarr, far to the west of the main city, a place that had once been a market but that had dried up in the lean times after the war with Brigid. It had once started to recover, but then the Alliance attacked, and any hope of verdant flowers in its old soil was blown away by that crimson wind.

There did Metodey set up shop these days, enjoying hunting human quarry in the buildings. And Yuri was particularly skilled, a trickster through and through; Metodey would be hunting him, would take joy in the pursuit. And that was assuming worst did not happen; rumors persisted that sometimes, the great dragon would join the hunt...

It wasn't all bad news though. The good news was that the once-maid was also an amateur cartographer these days, and spent her spare time compiling maps of the underground and of Enbarr for the resistance to use. For the Wolves and her former lady, she was able to produce a map of entrances to the area where Metodey did his hunting. She was even able to identify the three most likely spots to keep Odesse; Metodey would have him watch. It was not the first time he'd made one lover watch another die.

There were two main entrances, both fairly large; the area had once had a significant smuggling den, which had needed to move goods. One entrance was almost right behind the area's center, but on consideration, Hapi decided to make that not their entrance, but their exit. It was easy to reach from anywhere in the hunting area, and they could start from one set to the north and go south, hunting for Yuri as they went. They'd take two teams. Fleche and Constance would find Yuri, with Constance using her pegasus to get them out; this was a rescue, not a fight.

Balthus and Hapi would be the second team. They'd go find Odesse, save him, and then assist the first team if Yuri still hadn't been found. Then both teams would hit the second entrance, which Fleche's former footman would keep open for them.

As for the chef, she prepared a set of gifts for them- three little bombs. Their small, handheld casks were designed so that you just had to twist the top; it would free chemicals to mix that shouldn't be mixed, and produce an explosion and stinging, noxious fumes. Not fatal, unless one got extremely lucky with the shrapnel, but very distracting, and it even worked on dragons. She'd been making and refining the formula for the last six months.

Fleche took them, and thanked her, and the chef seemed younger in that moment.

The Wolves talked on the trek, but Fleche simply focused in silence on her goal as they passed through the tunnels like cindered shadows, Randolph voicing her thoughts.

_Save him._

-

Yuri stood before Macuil. He was afraid; he was terrified; he was resolute.

He stood before the great dragon, hands folded, and he did not run.

“ **Not going to run?** ” Macuil said. “ **I know you said you wouldn't... but you humans are so clumsy with your promises, especially to yourselves. You fail them all the time. Run, now, and perhaps I'll give you more of a headstart.** ”

Yuri shook his head. “ No.”

He'd hoped, briefly, when Macuil showed up, as Metodey was getting ready to hunt him, that perhaps he could twist the situation to his advantage.

Unfortunately, Metodey, while a sadist, wasn't a fool... and apparently this had happened before? The killer had bowed to Macuil, and wished him fun on his hunt; Macuil had responded with a snort of amusement, the friendliest noise to a human Yuri had ever heard of him making. Perhaps sadists of all kinds at least shared that much camaraderie.

Metodey had walked away, leaving his guards here as a courtesy to Macquil; a swordsman, an archer, and a great big hulking man brute who looked inhuman, all arrayed around Yuri, to make sure that he only did what he was told.

And then Macuil had told him to run.

Yuri had thought about it. Before something like this, fear was the appropriate response...

But no one who ran from Macuil lived. No one who faced the great dragon _ever_ lived. 

To run was not to choose survival, it was just to choose to die the way this monster wanted him to. And Yuri, may the dead Goddess forgive him, had _never_ obeyed surface-dwellers.

...No. Yuri would not play along for a monster's fetishes.

Yuri had chosen a different route. Running would get him killed. So would standing here.

But one route was what the dragon wanted, and if he could not strike any true blow, he could at least make his own choice.

So he stayed right where he was.

“ **How amusing,** ” Macuil commented. as Yuri stared defiantly at him. “ **I think I like your spirit. Perhaps we will wait, and see your limits. It's always fun when the brave among you break. You will run, in time.** ”

It had entertained Macuil so far... he seemed to think of it as funny... but his patience would grow thin, eventually.

And when it did, Yuri would die.

( _Please, Goddess_ , he thought, and did not let his fear show on his face with an act of supreme will. _Don't let my death be like Randolph's._ )

-

Nearby, high up in what had once been a penthouse suite, a small trio watched through their window as Yuri stood in the face of death. Two were Leceister guards; the other was Odesse, gagged and tied to a chair, who snarled at his gag and at his restraints.

“ Aww, sad? Don't worry, I'm sure you'll find another special someone,” said one of the guards with false sweetness, the other coughing out a laugh. " Assuming Macuil doesn't kill you too."

Odesse cussed again, rocking his chair back and forth.

“ Enough, enough, shit, I'll tie you down if you keep that up,” said the other guard..

“ Let's hear what he's saying,” the first speaker cajoled. “ Gotta be pretty good, right? Dude's a preacher.”

“ Capital idea,” his compatriot said, and went over to Odesse, steadying his chair and removing his gag. " Any words of wisdom, holy man?"

Yuri's lover, brave and defiant, spat at the guard. The other one laughed as the first one snarled.

“ Fuck you,” Odesse growled at him. With his mask off, it was easy to see how young Odesse really was; but he had no flinch in him.

“ I think the Agarthan wants a beating,” the guard he'd spat on said, his companion still laughing.

The laughter turned to a gurgle as a deadly blade sliced through both their necks, the men falling in pools of their own scarlet. They hadn't heard the door open, for their assassin had timed it perfectly with Odesse's wriggling about.

Odesse turned to look at his would-be savior.

“ Odesse,” Petra said, smiling. “ I did not think we would get into this kind of trouble while we were trying to set up a mere _meeting_.”

“ Oh, you know me,” Odesse said. “ Drama's my favorite thing. How'd you escape? And do we have any way to get down there and save Yuri?

" I am very dangerous," Petra answered simply, as she moved to free him. " As for Yuri... I did manage to steal a wagon and some horses..."

A moment later, as she was untying him and they discussed what to do, Balthus and Hapi burst in, ready to fight... and skidded to a stop as they saw their work already done for them.

Everyone paused, Petra and Odette as surprised as they were, both sides staring at each other in confusion.

“ The hell?” Balthus asked conversationally.

-

Unsteady moved gracefully on the ground as he, Constance on his back, and Fleche sneaked in. Constance had lost her original pegasus during Garreg Mach's fall and had no idea what had happened to it; just one of the million things lost when Claude had decided to murder everybody in Fodlan at the whim of a deranged dragon priestess.

She'd named this new one- whom they'd rescued in a raid six months back- Unsteady, because he was the only pegasus she'd ever seen who was more agile on the ground than he was in the air. He flew like he was drunk, high, and suffering a concussion all three; but he ran faster than a racetrack champion, and could do it for days.

Personally, Fleche thought she was insane for keeping a _fucking pegasus_ in an underground city, but Constance's force of will was so strong she made it work, so who was Fleche to complain?

“ Remember, we spot them, we dash in, we get them out,” Constance said. “ You go before me- scout around.”

“ Understood,” Fleche said, whirling her twin daggers. “ I'll take care of the guards.”

“ Fleche...” Constance said softly, because for all the woman's harshness and arrogance, she was the one most morally opposed to letting Fleche fight. “ You don't have to.”

“ No, but it will make this easier,” the maiden replied. “ I also enjoy it, so it's two for one.”

Constance shook her head as Fleche took off, Randolph reminding her of how it worked. _People don't die easily or quietly unless their throats don't work._

Jugular vein, on the side. Not in front, every idiot who ever wrote a book sliced throats from the front but to get to the vein you have to punch the blade in from the side.

She crawled forward, rounding what was once a jeweler's shop, and spotted her first two guards. Lazy women, the both of them; they were facing inwards and chatting cheerfully about their favorite liquor. Fleche's former maid had said that Metody's troops had orders not to interfere in his hunts, only to keep the hunted prey inside; they were watching for trouble from within, and could not see it without.

Fleche took her daggers from their sheaths, and crawled up behind them, noting that they weren't even wearing helmets.

So. Snicker-snack.

She sprang up, jumping and touching the jewelry store wall with her feet, kicking off of it to gain some height. She ended up in the air between the duo, standing conveniently close together, and with two brutal sideways stabs, drove her daggers through their throats.

They choked, but even as Fleche landed, she went into a kneel and struck again, lashing out with her palms against the duo's crotches. Metal codpieces, of course; but a hard enough blow- like a huge, open slap- would still hurt something fierce, drive that metal into one's groin. It worked better on men, but people forgot that it worked very well on women, too... and it added the further benefit of knocking the air out of the duo, meaning not just the dagger kept them from raising an alarm.

The duo, distracted, choked on the metal and blood in their throats, crumpled to their knees from the pain in their groin, and died in silence. Fleche rose as they fell, withdrawing her daggers from the sheath of their throats with a smooth motion.

Behind her, Constance simply stared, surprised as she always was by Fleche's impossible deadliness. 

The pattern was like that, as they went deeper and deeper in, Fleche scouting and killing while Constance hung back. Hapi and Balthus had went in first, and she hoped they were making better time than they were. Every corner had more guards. Here a man relieving himself on a wall away from his partner; a knife under his chin up through his throat, pinning his mouth shut, the second pinning his left hand to his groin and slicing his manhood so that he died in silent agony. His partner a second later, the woman sitting down in a convenient chair. Lazy, lazy, lazy... Fleche drove both daggers into her throat, nearly severing her head, the woman dead almost as soon as she realized she was under attack.

She would be surprised; the Alliance was better than this... but then she realized that nobody attacked Metodey's troops during a hunt. People were too scared of him. The irony, that because no one attacked his troops at this time, they had no real plan for dealing with such an attack... 

As Fleche wiped the last soldier's blood from her blades, she turned one more corner around a fabric shop and.... oh Goddess.

The dragon.

The dragon. _The_ dragon, the one she would think of forever, until her curse relented and let her die. _The dragon_ , he was looming over Yuri with the sun behind him, it was Randolph all over again.

Her brain trembled, her hands shook... Constance caught up, and Fleche heard her gasp, as she took in the view.

Yuri was about to die. She was going to see him die, no, not again, not again, not _again_...

( Her brain has the strangest thought.)

Her curse meant she'd live, right?

( Yes.)

_She'd_ live. Yuri wouldn't.

But if she always lived...

If she was between the dragon and Yuri... past the guards, who she just now saw, her eyes on _the dragon_ , but there were others here. Three, to be precise.

She could kill three people. She could save Yuri. Constance, behind her, was whispering- something about a plan- but Fleche couldn't hear her, Randolph was talking, the plan was taking shape in her mind, the steps to this deadly dance that would put three men down and distract a monster just long enough to save Yuri.

( In an alleyway nearby, unbeknownst to any of them, Petra, Odesse, Hapi and Balthus tried to figure out how to save their alpha, not knowing that the Pack's erstwhile omega was one step ahead of them.) 

Randolph nodded to her, and he wasn't Randolph alive but the way he'd died, all shreds and pieces, but still he nodded and yelled _Save him!_

She dashed in. No attempt to tell Constance, no communication, no... nothing. Just _go_.

The first man, who had lifted his sword arm in a stretch behind his head, was closest to her; dagger into his armpit. Humans were soft there. In, out, like a handshake with someone you hated. Move, move, move, _move_ , she was running past the length of the monster but don't look, just look at Yuri, just look at him. She slid past an archer whose bowstring she cut with a single hard swing of her right hand. Goddess bless her brother, that he had bought daggers of magical silver, that could do the work she needed them to.

She ran, not looking back, even as the archer looked at his busted weapon in stunned awe and Macuil became aware of her presence. The last target, a man in armor before Yuri, against whom all the noble Wolf's dancing and trickster swordplay meant nothing, against whom Fleche could not fight.

But then again, Fleche was no fighter. She was an assassin, she was a killer, and this man had his back turned to her.

She leapt, the short maiden's reach extended by her jump enough that she could slide her silver dagger into the thin separation between his vambrace and his helm, cutting off his spine at the base of his skull. The man dropped, and Fleche rolled off of him as she fell, dagger retrieved in one smooth jerk of her wrist.

Yuri, nonplussed, stared at her- the entire assault, which left two men dying and one archer useless, hadn't taken more than a split-second. The dragon- _the dragon, the dragon, the dragon_ \- had time to cock one eye in surprise at her.

She threw her brother's dagger at that eye.

“ **Fuck you!** ” she screamed, all eloquence gone with her brother a year and a half ago.

The dagger flew true- but this was an old dragon, and on reflex it dodged, flinched its huge head, knocking the dagger away. It sailed off, sparkling in the sunlight, burying itself into the wooden support beam on the second story of what had, before all this, been a silk merchant's shop.

Neither Fleche nor Yuri saw it, because Fleche already had her hand on Yuri, was dragging him back to Constance, who had caught up during the brief pause of Fleche's brave throw, heels dug into Unsteady's sides as she hoped desperately to save Yuri and Flech both. Even as she reached them, leaned over to pull them on, she stared for just a second at Fleche, at this brave surface-dweller pup.

“ Go, go!” Fleche begged, as Yuri stumbled to his feet, Constance pulling him aboard, kicking down on Unsteady with her heels even as the two clambered on in a half-ass sidesaddle sit. The dragon turned that horrific head to them, but they were going, running, already escaping.

A rumble as the beast took in a breath.

“ **Adrestia resists!** ”

Darkness, blessed darkness, slammed into the thing's head, it jerked its head away from that blast and its deadly breath was wasted, landing on the Allied archer, who had still been staring dumbstruck looking at his bow. The wind blast reduced him to gory shreds, and kicked up a horrific amount of dust that further obscured the dragon's sight.

Fleche's head whipped to see who their savior was- Odesse, Yuri's boyfriend, the Agarthan priest maskless with shadows in his hands, riding in a wagon coming out of a nearby alleyway, a wagon pulled by two horses. Balthus stood with him, and fired a shot of his own, light magic whipping out and into the dragon- though Fleche noticed that neither the shadow nor the sunlight penetrated the thing's scales. It was annoyed by them, but it was not _hurt_.

In the front, directing their driver, was Hapi- and holding the reigns of those horses was someone whose face she knew from a newspaper drawing, back before, when her brother was alive and she was not yet cursed.

“ Petra?” Fleche said, stunned, as the dragon spread his wings to catch them. Fleche shook herself, Randolph pointing behind her- no time to gawk- _the dragon_ , coming after them, she could hear the flap of his wings, see it as the dust began to clear away. Once he was in flight he'd catch and kill them, they wouldn't be able to escape...

Something jangled against her side.

She still had the bombs.

She leapt from Unsteady's back, Yuri and Constance screaming, Balthus and Hapi screaming, all the Wolves were howling her name; but they shouldn't have bothered. She couldn't die... but she would _not_ watch them die, either.

No.

She pulled a bomb off her belt, twisted the cap, and chucked it as hard as she could, aiming where she hoped the dragon would be, then pulled out another, ready to go.

Her guess had been good. The bomb hit him, as he emerged from the dust. Unfortunately, her timing had been bad; the delay was too long, it slid off before exploding, about three seconds, all told. It still distracted him, he glanced at it for a second, it let her twist the cap on the second one. Three seconds, three seconds; Randolph counted next to her. _One..._

The dragon looked back, put his cruel eyes on her. She reared back her arm.

_Two_!

She threw, and her aim was perfect; it exploded in front of his nose, and the dragon hacked and coughed, flying up to get the stinking, cloying decay out of his eyes and nose.

She grabbed her third, and threw it, too, chasing him up, up, as her mouth ran away from her, Fleche not even hearing herself speak as she ranted and screamed.

“ **Run, you Goddess-damned lizardbird, it won't save you! It'll do na good, we'll see you flat, we'll piss on your bones! Erry soul in Enbarr is against you, you killed my** _ **sib**_ **and** _ **fuck you,**_ **Adrestia resists!** ”

A storm of dark magic lit Macuil up just as her last bomb exploded, the great beast hacking and coughing, half-blind. Strong arms suddenly grabbed Fleche, and when she whipped her head around, she saw Balthus' worried face. It was his arms around her, bodily hauling her onto their cart with desperation in his every feature. Hapi shared that look, had turned her cart around, and now Petra was wheeling it about once again as Odesse, next to them, kept casting.

They'd come back for her.

“ **Adrestia resiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiists!** ” Odesse bellowed as he threw yet another spell at _the dragon_ , damn near singing it, because Yuri had fallen in love with the most overdramatic Agarthan in existence.

_Of course,_ Randolph said, sitting on the wagon's side as Balthus put her down, _he's both an Agarthan and a dark mage, it'd be weirder if he wasn't._

She giggled as that self-same self-important bishop turned to her.

“ A fine speech, little lady!” Odesse said, smiling at her. “ And good show with whatever those bombs were, he did not like that, let me tell you!”

Fleche giggled again at the mannered Church priest as they escaped, and then she was laughing, she was actually _laughing_ , a laugh of pure joy, the kind she had not laughed in a year and a half.

But now, now she could, they were _escaping_ , she didn't have to watch them die, they were _all_ going to _live._

_The dragon_ roared and tried to follow, but he was half-blind from her bombs. It wasn't enough of an advantage to stay in the fight- Odesse was a shadow bishop trained by the Church itself, and his spells had just slid like water off the beast's scales. No weapon they had could hurt him, and as soon as his eyesight returned, he'd tear them apart.

But the Wolves had not come here to slay a dragon, but to save their alpha; and he was alive, on Unsteady's back. It was time to go.

They raced down the street as the dragon tried in vain to clear his eyes, the Wolves making a single right turn at an alleyway to a long, low building that, secretly, connected with its neighbor. They abandoned the wagon and set its horses to running down the main street, a distraction for any pursuers, and were rewarded when _the dragon_ flew after it, chasing what he could hear even if his eyes were still blurry, his wings beating the air like the fist of a frustrated, angry god.

Inside those connected buildings they found a basement, Unsteady hopping gently down the stone stairs with the slightest uncurling of his wings, Fleche nearly falling down the stairs in her haste as that terrible sound grew louder; _the dragon_ was returning, had only been fooled for a second.

Still, she kept laughing. She felt invincible in those seconds, like they could not be stopped, and cheerful laughter fell from her lips like water from a broken fountain.

The basement was huge, this place once a smuggler's legitimate storefront, and the entrance was likewise large- and well-disguised, a chunk of floor cleverly placed so that it could be moved. It was open, her former footman standing beside the open trapdoor, urging them to enter swiftly as they heard the warning rumble of _the dragon's_ breath.

Down, down they went, then the door was shut- but the path was well-lit, the torches along the walls providing ample light. They ran, Fleche finally sobering up as they heard _the dragon_ tearing apart the building above them; they ran, and the cook readied her homemade barrels of bombs, telling them to keep going.

They ended up not needing them, though the cook stayed for three days at her station, waiting to see if the entrance had to be destroyed. But the Alliance must have missed it with human and dragon eyes both... and entrances as big as this one were too useful to destroy without cause.

( Unbeknownst to them, Ignatz had investigated personally, and his clever eyes had found the entrance. No word of it passed the Deer's lips, he instead coming up with a convincing lie based on an entrance he knew the Alliance already knew about; though Claude was not holding back against Edelgard, he hoped for the Enbarr Resistance to survive, and someday revive Adrestia's ancient culture. By betrayal was the resistance spared the loss of one of its secrets.)

And thus the Wolves returned, safe and sound, and with an Eagle flying alongside.

-

Enbrine celebrated the rescue with uproar and delight. It was a victory, and a magnificent one at that. Not only was Yuri alive, not only was Odesse alive, but they had found _Petra_ , they knew that at least one of Edelgard's new Elites had survived.

Petra, who taught them of many things she'd seen as she traveled, who told the stories she'd heard of Black Eagles; Petra, who painted that sacred symbol herself on Enbrine's outermost wall, at the council's request, and for just a moment, everyone, down to the lowest and meanest thief, felt that they were part of something bigger, something _special_.

Even Fleche, who still held to her belief that the other Eagles were dead, had enjoyed that moment of unity, standing beside her once-servants and the Wolves, cheering alongside her fellows.

-

A day later, when things had calmed down, Fleche went to Yuri.

“ I... I want to join,” Fleche said. Yuri smiled.

“ Done.”

She paused. “ I... expected there to be more ceremony, I suppose.”

Yuri laughed.

“ You saved my life!” Yuri exclaimed, throwing his hands up. “ You saved my mighty Odesse! You fought _Macuil_ for me!”

“ Not much of a fight,” Fleche said. “ Just threw a dagger at him.”

“ He's the size of a building, it's still the bravest thing I've ever seen anyone do,” Yuri said. “ You were a Wolf the second you wanted it, for all you've done for me, and now that you've said it, it's done. You're an Ashen Wolf, now and forever, Fleche.”

He pulled out a pin with their symbol on it, a heavy and weighty thing, a badge of honor, and she took it in her deadly hands. She ran a finger down its smooth edge, marveled at the feel of it- a thing of steel, this, as strong as the loyalty it evoked in those who wore it.

Yuri's voice was soft. “ Welcome home, pup.”

She looked up from the pin and smiled at him. It was weak, and wavering... but it felt nice, to smile.

Randolph smiled too, at her, at Yuri, who was taking care of her in his absence, he smiled at them and there were tears in his eyes.

“ I'm just sorry you lost your brother's dagger,” her alpha said.

“ I saved you,” she said, with a small shrug she didn't quite feel. Her brother's dagger mattered to her, mattered _so_ much... but Yuri mattered more. “ It's a fair price to pay.”

And he hugged her, because he understood just how much it had cost her, to lose that dagger.

“ I know that I can never truly replace what your brother gave you,” he said, “ but I do have another gift. Now I'm not asking you to accept this, I completely understand if you don't want to take this particular gift. My feelings won't be hurt, I'll just put it away, it's no trouble! But having made you lose one dagger, well, I thought it only appropriate if I rectify the loss.”

He opened a drawer in his desk and withdrew from it a strange blade, oh, strange and strange; a dagger, a little thinner and a little longer than the one still strapped to her right wrist, but the hilt and blade were all of one piece, like it had not been forged so much as stamped out. The material was black, so black it drank in the dim torchlight all around them, and its crossguard was a single delicate horizontal strip.

“ We found this under Garreg Mach,” Yuri said. “ No idea what it's made of, but it's damn near unbreakable, the edge never dulls, and it's perfectly balanced. It's a little light for me... but it might be just right for you. I fully understand if you don't want to replace your brother's dagger, but I thought I should offer it to you anyway.”

Fleche stared at the dagger. Her gut instinct said no; it wasn't her brother's dagger. It couldn't protect her.

But Randolph, be he hallucination or ghost- and how could she tell, if her eyes were mad, how could she herself know that?- put his hand gently down on the strange dagger's hilt, and turned to her, smiling through his tears.

_Take it,_ he said. _It's ok. He cares about you, too, the way I do._

Fleche blinked away sudden tears in her vision, and did not hear Yuri's soft gasp of surprise when she took the dagger.

-

That night saw her back at what had been her home for a time. The little girl, becoming a woman- becoming whatever time and bloodshed and her hallucinations were making of her- did her usual evening routine.

But tonight was the last time she would be here; the Wolves would be along tomorrow morning, to haul her things to their lair... to her lair now, too, she supposed.

She went through her nightly ritual one more time in that lonely place, that had nonetheless safely guarded her for over a year now; washed, drank, dressed in things provided for her by her friends. By her fellow Wolves, now, by her Pack, who had cared for her for so long... Fleche, entirely without realizing it, had become part of a... of a family, again.

She had missed that.

The cook was coming, too. The once-snappish woman had learned of regret in the meantime, and wanted a second chance to prove her loyalty; Yuri gave it to her, was glad to help one who had aided in his rescue. Petra was rooming with them, too, said she felt more comfortable near fellow former students of Garreg Mach, and perhaps Fleche would get to know that woman, would ask her of her nephew, and see what kind of man he had become, in the time since they had parted.

Other things needed doing. The Wolves had an aura of the impossible and the dashing now, and new missions were already rolling in, requests from all sorts of people hoping for lupine aid. Drunks and whisperers were howling their names, and those who wanted great deeds done now had at least one group in mind for the job.

That wasn't even counting the tasks they _knew_ they'd be getting into. Yuri wanted her to visit a leatherworker and get her armstrap fitting to her new blade. Odesse had big plans to start a new dark magic school, as soon as Vestra's ship, the _Imperial Servant_ , returned from its latest raid. The council was preparing a list of traitors for Petra to carry with her, and take back to Edelgard, so the Emperor could know who in Enbarr had held true in adversity and who had sold their land for a dragon's hoard... and when Petra left Enbarr, as she planned, it would probably be the Wolves who hauled her out.

So much to do... and so much of it dangerous. She would... she would have to do more, _be_ more, to protect her pack. She had quite a reputation... she wondered if she could join the council, become one of the heads of the rebellion. She was young, yes, but so was Yuri... and it wasn't like the council had requirements, specifically. Maybe just being the terrifying crazy assassin girl would be good enough.

But, just in case, Flech lowered her head.

“ Goddess-in-Byleth,” she prayed, “ please protect my pack.”

She did not believe in the Black Eagles, and of the dead Goddess she was not sure... but she could believe in the Ashen Wolves. As they had cared for her, now she would, in turn, care for them.

She might never be the woman she was meant to be; but this woman was an Ashen Wolf, and that was no bad thing to be.

The next day, Randolph, at the serving bar one last time, pointed at the pin Yuri had given her, and when the Wolves arrived to help their newest member (with Petra in hand, because helping was what she did), she had affixed that pin onto her armor, never to leave it.

( And in Enbarr above, her brother's lost dagger waited, silver hilt gleaming softly in the sun.)

-

Here is a story they tell in Enbarr.

“ Fleche... smoking coffin, I don't know what's to tell and what's quiet. She ain't well-formed, you see? Not in her head, not anymore. Saw that big fucking lizardbird torture her sib to death, right there on the steps for erry person in Enbarr ta see. She screamed- smoking coffin, how she fucking _screamed_ \- but erry soul was screamin', so the lizardbird never noticed. Some of her brother's people, them what's mostly flat now, held her back, but she was fightin' so hard they couldn't drag her back, so she just _watched_ as her sib died, she watched and she screamed.”

“ Well, now that wouldna do none no good. I didna like watching her sib die and I didna know the man, can't 'magine what suffering she's had. It was bad enough she went ill-formed right then and there, that's the size of it, she came back still trying to scream with a throat that didna work no more, she'd been made quiet for a week; but then she gots back up, and she wents right to work, 'cept now she talks to her brother softly alls the time.”

“ Now, she doesn't pay it no nevermind, it's just what she does, and you shouldna neither, because that ill-formed little girly is the deadliest fighter we got, Agarthan truth I swear. She can put any Allied bastard flat, no matter who it is, she just goes in with those two daggers of hers a'buzzing like bees in her hands. She takes any mission and 'slove, she manages it, she comes back all talks with her ghost but the work is done. Erry soul sorta pities her and most of us hate usin' her like this but my think on the matter is that it's good for her; she needs to do stuff, can't stay cooped up in here just chattin' with her dead. Yuri takes care of her, and he's skilled enough at it, I's 'pose; she seems to like it, anyhow.”

“ She's friendly enough, she's functional, and she's ill-formed death on legs from the Goddess' smoking coffin itself. My think is, we're all smuggles and shits here, who're we to judge?”


End file.
